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I don't have a phone line for my home. Instead, I have a VOIP MagicJack that cost me about $20/year for unlimited calls. It is wired in place of my old phone line in my home, the old land line phones work the same way as always.

At my business, we replaced all telephone equipment with VOIP equipment. Audio quality is better than cellular, not quite as good as the old land line, but is plenty good enough, and we can have representatives take calls anywhere over wifi or any other Internet connection.

Over 90% of my use of my cell "phone" is for Internet-related activity, and the phone is really just one of many apps on the phone consuming data.

The idea of a "phone" is already obsolete. Why are we doing this, again?

And my co-workers already get harassing calls on their personal phones from Nigerians using IP based calling services such as Magic Jack. The spammers pay a monthly service charge that makes each call less than a penny, much much less than a penny. It is practically free already.

http://www.magicjack.com/plus-v05/

Take the magicJack Plusâ with you when you travel outside of the country and you will have free calls back to the U.S. and Canada. No matter where you are in the world you can call the U.S. and Canada for free. You can also consider buying magicJack PLUS for someone you know that lives overseas and give the gift of free calls to U.S. and Canadian Phone Numbers.

So you are subject to provions in a contract that you are not allowed to know. It would surprise me very much if they could hold that up in court...

MagicJack does it. In their terms of service they have a usage limit of 20 times that of the average user, but they won't tell you how much that is.

I use the MagicJack for my phone service and my number is totally unlisted and if I need a new number it costs a nominal fee.

With this I find it would be hard to be harassed by anyone, bill collectors or otherwise.

So how does SKype compare to this new competition I discovered? http://www.magicjack.com/5/index.asp

I don't know anything about MagicJack, but it looks easy enough to use, and $20 a year is certainly a good price. That's cheaper than my current 5 c/minute rate. C-NBC called it a "Skype and Vonage killer"?

I have activated 4 MagicJacks without issue. I suspect the problem here may be a PEBCAK error here but I am not sure unless I have more info on what you did to include the spec of your machine and connection. I am not sure how your post was rated +5 "informative" because it is anything but. I don't doubt that you had an issue with two of them but from the looks of it you didn't even try to download the update which I suspect would of fixed your issue. Just a guess without knowing more. FYI I do not in any way work for MagicJack.


Update for users with Windows 7
Taken from FAQ here

or WinXP
Taken from FAQ here

you are correct.

worthless junk is a far better phrase that is suited for Magic Jack

you are correct.

worthless junk is a far better phrase that is suited for Magic Jack

Well, just FYI I have AT&T's Callvantage service. Never had a problem with it, the feature set is really nice (I like getting emails with my messages as WAV file attachments) and it's $24.95/month. International rates are competitive as well. For example, my girlfriend is from Lagos, and Comcast Digital Voice wanted about $3.50 a fucking minute. Callvantage wants fifteen cents. Calling anywhere in the U.S., Canada and a number of U.S. territories is free.

They also have a softphone that runs on your PC, but I haven't tried that. I just connected the D-Link interface to the punchdown block in my utility room and all the phones in the house work fine.

There's also that Magic Jack gadget that I've seen marketed on TV all the time. One of the engineers at work has one, says it works great. Cheap too, about twenty bucks for a whole year.

I don't know the feasibility of using this over there, but if you have access to a computer you could look into a Magicjack.

Basically, you plug the Magicjack into a USB jack and it acts like a Voip gateway for a phone. You can use a regular phone or a computer Speaker/Microphone to call. Since you can use a local number for your jack, if you family calls you it will not be long distance. It also supports Caller-ID and voicemail. combine with this phone, and you got a lightweight solution. Although that handset isn't looking too stellar review wise.

It's not the cheapest solution though. Magicjack costs 39.95 for the unit which comes with 1 year of service. After that it's 19.95 a year. Also, the Military may frown on software being installed on their PC's. If you are bringing a notebook or Netbook you shouldn't have a problem though. Third, bandwidth could be an issue too, since it needs a minimum of 128 kb/s to function.

http://magicjack.com/ . YMMV, but apparently this little device plugs into the back of a USB port and you then plug any phone into the back of the device. As long as the software is running, for $40/year you are supposed to receive unlimited local and long-distance calling. You must have a computer running 24/7 if you plan for your phone to work 24/7. It doesn't make sense to keep a desktop with a 250W power-supply running 24/7 just to have a working phone -- in some markets, the money you save on the phone service might just be diverted to your electric bill. However, with an old laptop computer that has a tiny power supply and really isn't good for much else, this might make sense. I've read some reviews about this thing that are positive and some that are negative... don't buy it without investigating it, their customer service is nearly nonexistent, but there are other people out there who seem happy with their $40/year local and LD phone service.