Hi folks,
Well this is sort of handy man related in that I recently purchased the
Ooma VOIP phone service and have been trying it out for a couple of days.
Overall it seems to live up to all the hype. I am curious first if any of you
have used it or know someone that has used it and do you know if anyone has
ever connected a satellite receiver to it?
I have a number of options available to me and one of those is to keep the most
basic landline service and have the Ooma device share that service. So, most
calls accept toll-free calls go out over the Ooma line from what I can tell,
but all other calls go out on the Ooma. THe advantage of this of course offers
fail-over capability. The other option is to split my phone lines off from the
lines coming into the house and what this allows is for me to take a dry-loop
for the DSL line and tie that directly to one phone jack in the home and the
other jack would allow me to possibly serve all the phones in the house just
from the Ooma device. I'm not entirely sure how all the magic works in the box,
but let me further explain something.
The Ooma hub has a few ports and just to give you an idea how this works, there
you connect this between your dsl/cable modem and your router. You can attach
it directly to your router, but apparently the benefit of putting it before the
router is the ability to prioritize voice calls over large file transfers and
the like. Now there are two RJ11 phone jacks and one is marked phone and the
other is marked wall port. How you apparently hook this up regardless of
whether you have dial tone is the phone goes to the phone jack and provides a
simulated dial tone and the wall port goes to the jack on the wall. There is a
relay in the box that apparently can detect dial tone and my assumption is that
based on the type of call, the unit can switch between the VOIP and copper
service. Apparently if you disconnect the dial tone and you want to have other
phones on the VOIP service, you purchase what amounts to a satellite that you
connect in the same manner. What I was thinking is wether it would be possible
to skip the satellites and just reverse the connection or better yet just
connect the wall jack to the phone port and share the dial tone with all the
phones. I know of course that isn't supported and would mean I'd have to
likely split the DSL line from all other lines in the house, but just giving
the idea some thought and wanted to see what others thought.
tnx,
