Ooma

Last time I talked about switching our home phone from a standard landline to a VOIP (or Internet) phone through Ooma.  In short, I couldn't be happier with the switch.  The sound quality with Ooma is as good, if not better, than it use to be.  Before buying the Ooma I was a little hesitant, at work we have a VOIP system and whereas it works good, from time to time the call breaks up.  But so far with Ooma that hasn't happened.  Ooma's marketing dept. likes to boast about how they have gone to great lengths to ensure the best sound quality in the industry.  So far their claims appear to be true.

The Ooma Telo itself is a very cool looking device.  It clearly has a modern look to it that is pleasant.  The buttons use capacitance touch so they are not physical tactile buttons at all.  Just touch the light to activate the button.  My only complaint with the Ooma Telo is the LED lights.  All of the buttons are blue LEDs which are always on and very bright.  At night it lights up the room it's in.  You wouldn't want this in the same room where you sleep.  What Ooma needs to do is A) decrease the brightness of the LEDs and B) only activate the lights for the buttons when someone is using them.  I've seen TVs with capacitance touch lighting similar to this.  When you press the buttons they light up and stay lit for several seconds.  That's what Ooma should do.  The Ooma logo can remain lit 24/7 as that's an indicator if the Ooma is connected to the Internet.  But turn off the lights for the buttons.  Overall this is a fairly minor gripe for such a great product.

The last thing I'll talk about is configuring the Ooma in my network.  The Ooma itself is fairly flexible; you can place the device between your cable/DSL modem and your router/firewall and Ooma will automatically apply QoS to ensure the best sound quality.  Or you can put Ooma behind the firewall, which is what I chose to do.  Doing so means Ooma has to compete with everything else for bandwidth, so if you're downloading a large file on another computer it could interfere with call quality.  So I manually configured QoS on my router.

My router is a Linksys with the 3rd party Tomato firmware installed.  There are a lot of sites that talk about how to configure QoS for VOIP; prioritize these ports and protocols, etc.  But I decided to go the easy route.  First I found the MAC address of the Ooma.  Second I configured any and all traffic to/from that MAC address to have the highest priority.  So I don't bother isolating port ranges and protocols, I just do one classification for the Ooma device's MAC address.  So far this configuration is working great!