 Review by DrStrange 
UPDATED: 123 days ago
member for 8.3 years, 3384 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 West Hartford,Hartford,CT
 $4 per month (12 month contract)
 about 5 days
 "It's very inexpensive and it works very well"
 "the fine print in the EULA, website slightly misleading, two-hour outgoing call limit, no local numbers in 860"
 "It's very inexpensive and it works very well."
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Ease of Installation:
Call Quality:
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Tech Support:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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I ordered a MagicJack on 7/3/2008 and it arrived Tuesday the 8th. It took about 2 minutes to set up and it was working. I set it up with an additional pair of 5.8GHz cordless phones next to our existing landline phones. I've tested it on several computers, including a Dell Inspiron laptop connected via wireless and an old Dell Dimension 4100 [USB1 ports] and a USB2 non-powered hub. I ended up hosting the MJ on an Inspiron 8100 with a USB2 card and a powered USB2 hub that I put in a corner of the computer room. My dedicated computer uses about 60 watts of power. I'm looking for a laptop with a broken display so that I can lower that figure.
MJ generally works flawlessly. Once in a while, there's some choppiness or echo, but restarting the MagicJack and redialing fixes this problem. My wife has used it quite a bit to call relatives in the Midwest and is very happy with it. It's paid for itself many times over.
We've used MagicJack for a year now. The call quality is good about 99% of the time. It's choppy about 1% of the time. For under $2 a month, I can redial when i get a choppy connection. Around the end of 2008, MJ experimented with time limits on outgoing calls. The initial 30-minute limit caused quite a few people to stop using MJ. After a lot of customer complaints, the limit was relaxed to 1 hour, then to an hour and 59 minutes. If you actually talk that long, just redial your call if it's dropped.
RE: CALL QUALITY: The lower your latency is, the better MJ will work. That's why people with good cable or higher tiers of DSL have better luck with MJ than people with bad cable or slower/problematic DSL.
I really don't care that it doesn't have a number local to my area, since I intended it for outgoing calls only.
The website looks like an ad for a bad used-car lot. Ignore it and research the facts [both good and bad] before deciding whether or not this is for you.
As for the fine print in the EULA, I don't care about targeted advertising when it's confined to the softphone and the softphone is non-intrusive. If you use MJ on a dedicated computer stuffed into a corner somewhere, you won't see the ads anyway.
I set it up with the free trial period, so I'll report back on whether I'm billed before the website said I would be billed. UPDATE 7/7/2009: I wasn't billed before the trial period was over. I've renewed my service for another year @ $19.95/yr. [that's the $1.68/month quoted in the infamous commercials].
I haven't had to deal with tech support in the year I've used MagicJack. I hear that the only support available is overseas-based chat.
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