Second Line options

If you want to extend all of the features of ooma to other rooms in your house, you need to purchase the $40 Scout for each location where you want to connect another phone. Of course, you can also use the Scout—or Hub for that matter—to connect a cordless phone.

Figure 2: The ooma Scout extends ooma services to other rooms of your house

As you can see from the figure above, the Scout has virtually all of the same buttons as the Hub.

Figure 3: Rear panel of the ooma Scout

To connect the Scout, you merely plug it into a wall jack and connect another analog phone. The Scout makes its digital connection to the Hub using HPNA (Home Phoneline Networking Alliance) technology, which uses your home’s phone wiring as an Ethernet substitute. However, when I attempted to connect the Scout to the Hub using my home wiring, I could not get a connection.

This is not that surprising, considering that I live less than a mile from a 50 KW AM radio station’s transmitter and, in the days of analog modems, there were only two products that could cope with the high levels of RF in my home. However, since the Scout and Hub would not connect through the wiring, I had to connect them directly to complete my testing. Once connected, the Scout worked exactly the same way as the Hub.

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