 Review by signmeupBOO 
UPDATED: 2.1 years ago
member for 7.9 years, 3763 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 Ithaca,Tompkins,NY
 $19 per month
 about 5 days
 "Support people are American and nice, sound is fairly good, Philippines plan exists"
 "Need more incentive on Philippines plan, some calls like cell phone, no go calling support once"
 "First day? Good, and the call to my wife overseas went very well."
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I signed up on the »jandr.com dealer's website for the special: 3 extra free months (@$19.9x per month) which was offered in addition to the 2 free months offered by Packet8 as well as no signup fee after the DTA box is purchased at regular price. That looked like a really nice deal. In the forum here there was some debate about how good a deal that was in reality. I felt that it was after all is said and done so I signed up, being that I am a poor person living on a limited income. The nice thing is that I now own the DTA outright as part of the deal.
Today was my day to recieve the DTA box. I took it out of the nice packaging, read the information that came with it. I plugged the DTA in to the network cable/Router, the phone into the DTA, and plugged in its' power, and voila: dial tone.
Then I went on and followed the _special_ instructions provided for J&R purchases customers and signed up on the special webpage. There was a glitch with the process using both Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer, but as I was on the telephone with customer support, he started the process for me, but mentioned Netscape, so I opened and tried it, and voila, I got through the process.
The three calls to support during and before my purchase the calls were answered within less than 5 minutes, which I consider very good compared to a lot of services nowadays. The people providing the support were in the USA which delighted me to no end!!! I hope that they keep doing it that way, too. The guys are knowledgeable so far and pleasant/supportive.
My first calls to my neighboring state of CT. had a little bit of a cell phone like sound for those who recieved the calls, so they said. However, the sound was not "bad" at all, just noticeably different than a POTS phoneline for them. OTOH, later on other calls to local people on it and overseas were great. In *all* cases the sound was good on my end.
To my surprise, even why running a P2P application with active transfers all sounded good, minus just a little bit a "warbling" at times.
My call to my wife in the Philippines went well, and I am constantly having trouble with my POTS (plain old telephone system) calls to there, just terrible cutoffs, disconnections, bad connections, and wrong connections. Yet, the two calls there via the DTA tonight went ok and well, respectivly.
Do I recomment? Based upon a first day experience, yes, and one's first day tells a lot about the future, or at least *I* hope that it does.
I only wish that the Philippines plan had a stronger incentive, but at least they offer one, and that I was delighted about!
~Bucky
PS, I have not signed up for the Philippines plan yet, I will convert over to it next.
UPDATE 1:
Several days later... Well, things have been going pretty well, and considering what we are asking of the technology, that is impressive in my mind. Call quality has been even better than to start with, and family members are impressed with the service.
My calls to the Philippines have been nearly flawless, yeah, there is a *little bit* of lag, but, as I say, it is not worse than dial up enough to be an issue. In every other way the call quality to a provincial area of the Philippines has been terrific, more that 300x's better than with dialup. I am not just B.S.ing here. Dialup was just TERRIBLE compared to this almost flawless service.
Now, I *did* get cut off to a busy signal once while talking to a Connecticut number, and had been on the phone for an hour and 20 minutes. I remember that happening to Verizon once as well. *Bu-ut*, if that is going to be the extent of my issues, then I still think that the service is good, I just hope that they could tell me what causes that and if they know how to fix it. My guess is that something happened with my broadband at that moment? Perhaps jitter? I didn't know how to check the diagnostics at that time, so I didin't see it.
I still recommend this service with a firm thumbs up.
~Bucky
UPDATE: It has been years since reviewing this service. I dropped them because they ceased being any where near competitive with rates calling to the Philippines where my loved ones are. Sadly, few if any of the VOIP services compete well with my POTS service rates to The Philippines right now. I don't know why the VOIP providers have to charge so much to call there, but it is a bummer.
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