Can anyone explain why someone must press '1' to answer...

[RealDave]

a forwarded call? I'm being completely serious. What feature does it offer? What purpose does it serve? (other than being a huge annoyance and breaking "true" call forwarding)

I've read here that this should be removed by the end of the year.

[murphy]

If you don't press 1 and answer the call, ooma doesn't have to pay a connection charge (or maybe a smaller one) to the called phone company.

[Groundhound]

It should be optional. The reason why you might choose to leave it in effect is if you want unanswered calls to be handled by Ooma VM instead of whatever VM or answering machine is on the forwarded line.

[greenwing]

This actually makes receiving some calls dangerous...i.e. I use multi-ring sometimes...Yesterday I had telo set to ring my cell at the same time as my home...

Telo worked and called my cell number when someone called my home number...I tried answering and it said to press 1...When your driving down the road you can't be bringing up the keyboard and entering crap on the keypad just to answer a call...

Is there a way to turn this off?

Poor design...

[MikeekiM]

I like it...and hate it at the same time...

I hate it because when I am on the road and my phone rings, my BT enabled GPS tells me that I have a call, but I can't answer it because I need to grab the phone and press 1... Annoying...

I like it because when I am out and about and my phone rings, and I answer and hear the ooma tone, I know that it's ringing in my house and can decide to hang up and either let it roll to VM, or let whoever is at home answer it... If I don't hear the ooma tone, then someone is calling my cell phone directly, and I don't mind taking the call...

[Groundhound]

Ooma's said they will make it optional at some point, in the meantime if you want call forwading (no multi-ring) without the need to press 1, you can set it to forward on network outage and then just disconnect your Ooma before you leave your home. Not a satisfactory long-term solution but if you're going to be away for awhile it's an ok workaround until Ooma offers the option on muti-ring.

[TRaymond]

Any update on this feature?? I REALLY don't like pressing 1. I end up missing calls all the time due to this!