Obihai makes some pretty cool boxes that may be worth looking at. The Obi100 costs less than $40 on Amazon and supports a single SIP account (service provider) and the Obi202 costs $70 on Amazon, supports multiple SIP accounts, and two phone lines. They are similar to Ooma except that they are unlocked. That is, when you buy an Ooma box, you're locked into Ooma's service. When you buy an Obihai box, you're free to experiment and find a service provider that you like and strikes the right price/service balance. The big selling point for the Obihai boxes used to be their support for free Google Voice service. Google abandoned support for a protocol that made that possible, and so now users are transitioning to other service providers.

At home, we just signed up for service through Anveo. They are offering three tiers of service to Obi users: $40/year (333 minutes/month calls in the U.S. and Canada), $84/year (1000 min./month calls in the US, Canada, China, Singapore, Puerto Rico, Thailand), and a small business/home office offering. One really cool thing about Anveo is that they let you create your own custom IVR call flows. Think Google Voice's detection of contacts and call handling on steroids. So, you could detect that your mother is calling and direct her call to your cell. You can come up with custom voice mail messages depending on the caller. You can create menus. Etc. It's really pretty impressive technology.

Setting up service with Anveo on our home phone was really easy. Everything was automatic.