Ooma Sucks

 

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So, I got an Ooma a few years ago for two reasons:

It worked all right for the first, but not great -- it regularly drops calls. Now, my connection isn't great, but I recently got a Republic Wireless cell phone, and wireless calls on the cell phone over the same connection work much better.

For my folks, I needed to be on the "Premier" subscription, so I could get a second Bellingham number for them to call. That subscription has some other nice features, as well. It was really nice for my folks calling, but they got a VOIP phone themselves recently, so I don't need it any more.

The premier subscription was set to autobill, so I wanted to turn that off. There was a "Change subscription" button, but when I clicked it, I got this message:

"To change or cancel a subscription, please call customer service at 1-888-711-6662."

Really? Do they like to hire ex-Comcast people?

So I called the number. The person on the phone didn't want to cancel my premier subscription, and insisted that there was no way to just stop the autobill, if they cancelled that, they'd have to cancel the service I already paid for. He wanted me to call back "a few weeks before it was time to renew, so I didn't lose the features that I had paid for."

We went around a few times, finally he offered me a $40 credit to my account to not cancel my subscription yet. After we went around a few more times, I finally got sick of talking with him and said fine, whatever, have a nice day.

Then it got weirder. After having badgered me into not cancelling yet, he decided that now he would cancel me and I wouldn't get the $40 credit. Did he offer the credit just so he could take it away? Whatever, fine, at least he was going to cancel the subscription.

He went away for a bit, came back and said that the subscription is cancelled.

Of course, when I look at my account on my.ooma.com, the subscription doesn't show as cancelled.

So, several reasons not to ever go with Ooma:


All material Copyright © 2006–2019 Ulysses Somers, except where otherwise noted.