said by aaronwt :

I have MagicJAck and pay $20 for the entire year. It sounds just like when I had my landline with FIOS only I'm saving almost $500 a year. Plus no taxes.

said by ITALIAN926 :

Majic jack sucks, are you serious? The most unreliable phone service on the entire planet.

said by tshirt :


Well, sort of.
with magicJack, you are are paying your BroadBand provider (Verizon, in your case) for the access point.
I'm sure all the telco's would be much cheaper in the voice market, if they didn't have the huge overhead of maintaining a local/long distance network (local termanation for non-customer calls are a particularly big drain).
As the telco's transition to pure IP voice service, I think you'll see the Broadband price rise to cover the network cost, and voice service drop closer to full service VoIP providers (vonage, etc.)

said by battleop :

Thanks for encouraging the 4 minute commercials they run. I don't care if it's the best service ever, I will never give them a dime.

said by ITALIAN926 :

Majic jack sucks, are you serious? The most unreliable phone service on the entire planet.

said by seaquake :

$15 a month for unlimited local, long distance and other services and I'll be impressed. That's assuming the quality is there. I've heard my in-laws Charter VOIP and it sounds like 1960's mission control. Actually, I'm exaggerating. Charter didn't sound *that* good.

said by fiberguy :

Great. It works for you. Glad your computer has become an ATA device for what should be treated as a lifeline service.

Now, back to reality where the air exists and water is required to sustain life.

MAGIC JACK IS NOT "PHONE SERVICE"... it's a toy, plain and simple. If I were to rank the phone services out there are sustainability:

POTS
Cable Switched Service
Cable managed VoIP Service / Fiber VoIP (FiOS, Surewest)
Cell Phones
3rd Party Vonage, etc
Two-Cans & String
Skype
MagicJack

MJ is a ponzi scheme waiting for the breaking news that will be the next shocking news cycle story, which isn't a shocker to some of us already. If anyone knows anything about MJ and its model, and how it plays with the rest of the PSTN, MJ can't survive. It will eventually hit it's plateau and the service will go dead.

This service is a joke. (Yes, I have it and I've used it. The service sits in the drawer now) Not only does this "phone service" require internet connections (which is fine) it also relies on the stability of your PC, as you/we know, that has to remain powered up AND not crashed or sleeping.

Vonage finds that many people are not too keen on the notion of having to self serve their home phone needs. They're not happy with having to do their own installs (which is why they now have installer teams same as satellite did years ago) they find that people are not keen on having to reboot/power cycle their phone box, and people don't want to be passed around between providers when there's an issue with the service. (All proven facts)

Now comes MJ being pushed as a "real player in the phone business".. HAH! MagicJack is really nothing more, in my opinion, than a service like Skype that can plug into your phone jack. However, the boob that "invented it" is playing people with the claims. $20 a year isn't sustainable - the service WILL go dark and probably not too far into the future as there are already signs of it.

Some of these "vision changers" think that people are going to simply give up stability for price. It took many years for the cell phone industry to even gain the status that it could be used as the only phone, and even then, people still complain about dropped calls, call clarity, and reliability.

MJ is hardly a phone service at all. Just becuase it can 'make a phone call' doesn't make it a phone service.. at best, as it stands, MJ is largely a techies toy.

Continue to use it, rave about it, praise it's ability to fit your needs, but DON'T call it phone service. I would NEVER port my primary, established, or important phone number to any company that doesn't stand behind its product or is held to standards by any authority that will ensure they are a sustainable provider.

To be honest, if government EVER did one thing right, they'd bar ANYONE from providing "phone service" or a service called "dial tone" to the end user in this country unless they followed rules and had oversight by the FCC. Phone service in the US is just FAR too important to allow children to hawk a service to the consumer made to believe that what they are getting is "phone service" which is largely compared to that of the likes of a reliable POTS service.

my 2-cents