Ooma Office: I cut my phone bill to twenty dollars a month

Fifty-five dollars a month. That was my phone bill for a business landline that rang straight to voicemail half the time. The line existed so customers had a number to call. Then I looked at what the number was actually doing. It was sitting on my desk, unplugged for two years, because I answer on my cell like everyone else.

Here's the thing. A business phone line is not a physical wire anymore. It is a service, and it costs what a streaming plan costs. I pay Ooma Office $19.95 a month for my main line. It rings my cell, my laptop, and a desk phone if I feel like it. I have had it for three years and the cable company's line is gone.

What I set up and what it cost

The hardware is a small black box called the Ooma Office base station. It plugs into your router and into the wall. About a hundred bucks, often less on sale. After that it is all monthly and it is per person. The base plan runs $19.95 per user per month, and the Pro plan is $24.95, no contract on either. I buy the base plan and I have never wanted Pro.

Numbered, because somebody will do these out of order.

1. Plug the base station into the router and let it update. Ten minutes, mostly waiting.
2. Pick your number in the app. They assign you one or port yours over. Porting mine took about two weeks, and the old line kept working until it moved.
3. Record the greeting on your actual phone, not on a laptop mic in a room with a box fan. I learned that one the hard way.
4. Set the ring rules. My line rings the mobile app first, then the desk, then voicemail that emails me a sound file.

Total setup: one evening, about $130 out the door, and $19.95 a month since. Against the $55 landline, that is real money over three years, and the feature list got longer, not shorter.

The tax office test

I installed the same box for Brubaker Tax Service last winter. During tax season their phone is a war zone. One old landline, one answering machine, and Carol was calling clients back from her personal cell at 9pm, which their husbands had opinions about.

We set up a ring group on Ooma. The main number rings the front desk and Carol's extension at once. If nobody picks up in four rings, an automated greeting gives office hours and sends the caller to voicemail that lands in everyone's email. The virtual receptionist answers before a human would, and it never takes a sick day. Carol told me it cut her evening callbacks roughly in half, and I believe her because she stopped calling me about it.

The honest downsides

Listen, because this matters. VoIP rides your internet. When the internet hiccups, the phones hiccup with it. I have had two bad calls in three years and both were days my cable line was misbehaving. If your connection is bad, fix that first. No phone service survives a bad pipe.

Support is thin. When I had a porting question I waited on hold longer than I wanted, and a lot of online reviews say the same thing, plus complaints about surprise renewals on hardware plans. Read your invoice. Turn off auto-renew on anything you are not sure about. And if the power goes out, Ooma has a backup number feature, but the desk phones are down. A $60 cell booster in the office is cheaper insurance than a backup phone service.

One more wrinkle. Because the call is data now, you can tell your router to treat it like it matters. That setting is called QoS, quality of service. Think of it as a plow lane. On a two lane road, the plow goes first and everyone else waits. You tell the router the phone calls are the plow. One checkbox, and the office phones stop crackling when somebody in the back room is uploading job photos.

What to do Monday

Find last month's phone bill and write down what you pay per line, with taxes. Then count how many people actually answer that phone. Multiply the Ooma number, $19.95, by that headcount and compare. If the difference is more than fifty bucks a month, call your provider and ask what the extra buys you. If they cannot answer, you have your Monday afternoon planned.