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Review by Judy Star 
Posted: 1 days ago
Fair warning: reviewer joined this week
 San Diego,San Diego,CA
 Contract price not specified.
 "Great Bargain"
 "N/A"
 "Quality sound, excellent price, nice staff, and a great bargain"
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My son told me about this product a few months ago. He lives on the east coast and it was getting expensive to talk with all of the long distance. I got the product 8 months ago. We started off on the month to month plan just to see if it would work out. We immediatley noticed the savings and jumped at the 2 year plan. We just got it out of the way and it's been great. I'm already saving money on a daily basis and I was able to keep my number. I will say that I was having a little trouble figuring out how to plug the thing in but I called them and they had someone right there to talk me through it. I have to say it was really nice to actually talk to someone rather than an automated machine... or someone that doesn't speak english.
This really turned out to be a good move... and we've saved alot of money. Plus there are some cool features and a free 2nd line. I'm just so used to the standard dial and talk that it's been neat to have the same feel of the land line but getting all of this other stuff and for less. I love finding the bargains. 
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Review by Network Guy
UPDATED: 3 days ago
member for 9.2 years, 3693 visits, last login: a few hours ago
New York
$18 per month
"Very good so far... Smooth migration from Broadvox"
"Very pleased"
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I was a Broadvox Direct customer for four years before Phone Power picked up my account. Having no prior knowledge of this company, my first reaction was feeling dumped onto a no-name corporate shell in the VoIP world. Hoping for the best, I called to confirm billing/address info, and the adapter was soon en-route to my residence.
The shipped Grandstream 502 adapter seemed cheap, but it works fine. Setting it up was easy using the voice prompts from the adapter. I was able to configure IP information using a cordless phone. I spent a total of 15 minutes from unwrapping the unit to making the first call.
Call quality is very good. The girlfriend can call her mom in Dominican Republic and it sounds as though she's calling next door neighbor. I'm also pleased that calling there only costs $0.03/min. Purchasing calling cards at the Arab convenience store is now likely a thing of the past.
I'm not much of a features user so I can't comment on that aspect. As long as I can get dial tone and can receive calls, I'm happy. And honestly for $18 per month, it doesn't get better than this.
Very smooth transition and comparable service to what I had before. I'm switching my parents to Phone Power from Vonage as well. Vonage works, but their service cost doesn't. Let's be real, it's a recession out here, and the monthly bills never stop coming.
Much kudos from me. Keep it up.
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Review by Fillimerica
Posted: 10 days ago
member for 1.2 years, 1 visits, last login: 10 days ago
Lake Hiawatha,Morris,NJ
$10 per month (24 month contract)
 about 3 days
"Fast startup, small ATA, clear instructions, number ported on-time"
"none!"
"Just getting started, smooth sailing at this point!"
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Just purchased PhonePower last month. On the east coast I was expecting the hardware to take a week or two to get here but USPS delivered it in 3 days. Set up the Grandstream behind my Buffalo router and it was plug and play. Dial tone in 15 minutes.
I had the number port delayed a few weeks because I wasn't home, but the port from Lingo happened right on time.
So far, so good. The few calls I have made sound okay. Will update this review once I have had time to use the features for a while.
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Review by fatuous
UPDATED: 10 days ago
member for 34 days, 8 visits, last login: 8 days ago
Eatontown,Monmouth,NJ
$12 per month (24 month contract)
about 15 days
"Great prices, good set of features, g.711 64Kbps codec"
"Echo cancellation, recent multi-hour outage (hopefully a one-time thing)"
"A tremendous VoIP value with a broad set of features."
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I'm a CallVantage refugee. So my review is mainly going to cover the difference I've noticed between PP and CV. I've had PP for almost 3 months now. It took about 15 days from my order date until PP ported my numbers over from AT&T, which I think is totally reasonable when moving a number from one carrier to another.
The PP Grandstream TA is plugged into my Verizon FiOS Actiontec router. I initially had the PP TA in front of the FiOS router, but later changed it because of my particular setup. The PP TA works just the same whether in front or behind the FiOS router.
Things that were better with CV than with PP:
• Tivo and fax worked fine over CV. Not with PP. In fairness to PP, they don't make any claims that this will work.
• PP has echo cancellation problems. As per PP recommendations, lowering the headset volume does typically get rid of it, but with CV, I never experienced echo at any handset volume, and CV was louder than PP, comparing highest volume setting to highest volume setting.
• PP plays horrible and annoying music to people that you put on hold. Currently they have no way to disable it. CV's hold was just wonderful silence.
• I've noticed 1 major and several minor outages with PP. I never noticed an outage with CV, and I've had CV since it was launched. Reading the forums, it seems like the recent PP outage was an anomaly, and I'm hoping that's true. But since it's me writing this review, and I've only had PP for close to 3 months, and they happened to have a major outage since I became a customer... I'll come back and update my feeling on PP reliability as time goes on.
• PP's account management website is functional, but not great. CV's website was much more intuitive and easy to use. Having said that, I get along fine with PP's website.
• CV had a softphone option. They charged an extra $5/month for it, but at least it was an option. I see in the forums that PP is developing a softphone, and I look forward to updating my review when it's released.
Things that are better with PP than with CV:
• PP is cheap if you get the 2 year upfront contract like I did. I'll have to pay some fees again when I reach 12 months like taxes and fees, but at worst, I'll pay less than $300 for 24 months. That's at most $12/month vs. the ~$31/month I used to pay for CV. Those prices are totals that include all the taxes and fees and such, not just the plan price.
• PP has the cloned line feature. I needed 2 numbers, so I got 2 lines and I haven't yet had a use for the cloned line feature though I did try it out, and it worked as advertised. So cloned line isn't a needed feature for me, but I could see how this would be great if I only had 1 phone number.
• PP uses a Grandstream TA that's very small, which is great. The DLink TA that CV provided was huge and generated tons of heat.
So considering the price, I'm happy with PP. But if CV came back tomorrow, even at the $31/month I was paying, I very well might choose to go back to CV. For me, phone service needs to be as reliable as possible, and I'll pay more for that. (Yes I know POTS is more reliable than VoIP for a whole plethora of reasons, but I'm in the business, and I want VoIP.) At the time I ordered PP, they seemed to be among the most reliable VoIP providers. Hopefully that will continue and the recent outage will go down as a one-time footnote in their hopefully long and successful history.
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Review by raderator
UPDATED: 23 days ago
member for 6.3 years, 1129 visits, last login: a few hours ago
Conklin,Broome,NY
$11 per month (24 month contract)
about 3 days
"Price, features, free cloned line"
"No Contact catagories, hidden fees"
"Great deal with all the features we need"
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We were switched over from Broadvox a few days ago (they gave up residential service) and things have gone smoothly. Everything works great, so far (Earthlink cable, 6 down, 1 up).
They did not charge us the $15 for shipping the ATA, unlike brand new customers. We got the $200/2 yr deal and they let us keep our free 2nd number from Broadvox. There is a $2/month fee and a 7.3% tax so our monthly cost comes to $11.53. We were paying $20 with Broadvox which had fewer features but was rock solid. No commitment tho. When the 2 yrs ends, we'll be back to paying something near $20/month, unless we go elsewhere.
Support has been good and is American based. I tested the QoS of the ATA and it actually works, yea! Does not seem to slow down overall speed either. We have one line in the computer room and the rest of the house is on the other. The ATA uses half the wattage of our old 24v Mediatrix and is a third the size. The sound is louder, which is good.
We have a month to try it out. Sometimes I think about Ooma and their cool new equipment but I don't think we need it. We don't screen our VM and if we wanted to have two lines on our phones, I could add the 2nd line to our home wiring and use a 2-line phone. The PhonePower website is ugly but functional. You can login without re-entering your user name and password. They put a big ugly sticker on the ATA but you can slowly peel it off once the unit is warm.
PhonePower also sells to businesses, which is a good sign for reliability and longevity. I doubt anyone makes money in the residential VOIP market.
Update: We just got a set of AT&T DECT cordless phones. They worked but there was a loud clacking sound during the dial-tone. I put back our old Mediatrix and there no problem. So I went to the live web CS and finally convinced them to lower the volume a bit and that cured it. I think that's what he did. I lost the chat window cuz of the ATA reboot. Vtech now owns AT&T and they look to be functionally the same.
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Review by analytic168
UPDATED: 26 days ago
member for 26 days, 0 visits, last login: 26 days ago
San Francisco,San Francisco,CA
$12 per month (24 month contract)
about 21 days
"Excellent customer service, excellent phone service, low cost"
"DIY setup works for me because I'm technically savvy but I imagine most VOIP users are"
"This is the VOIP provider to get. btw i'm in San Francisco"
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I set this up for my girlfriend. She is from Canada and needed cheap phone service because she calls home a lot. We live in San Francisco. I set her up with Skype initially (being the cheapest) but the phone service was extremely iffy and my gf wanted to use a real phone. After reading some reviews here of various VoIP providers, I decided to go with Phone Power. Other providers seemed to have higher ratings, but Phone Power seemed to have the most active users and the most established reputation based on the forum activity here and elsewhere. I had doubts because there weren't very many reviews in San Francisco, but I figured they're in California so it should be OK.
In the end, Phone Power has worked out so well that I am taking the time to write a review. I relied heavily on the other reviews here, for which I'm grateful. So here is my lengthy story:
I ordered the 2-year $199/year package. With taxes it came to $253. I read and believe there are some obligatory charges (maybe $40?) the second year (I think it's taxes or something). The first time I tried ordering their web site wasn't working. I had to do it again the next day. Before ordering, I chatted with a sales person on their web site, who was able to confirm for me that my first order didn't go through, and some specifics about the 30-day guarantee. My order went through the next day I received an email indicating they couldn't port my gf's old phone number (it was already disconnected, oh well) and that I needed to choose a phone number from the web site. I chose one and told them over e-mail which one I wanted. Then my order went through and within another day I received an email confirming shipment of my Grandstream.
They shipped my Grandstream via USPS. There was a little bit of delay on my part because I had this shipped to my work and they put my gf's name on it, which confused the people at my work. Plus I didn't check my packages for a couple weeks. That's all my fault. Their customer service however was EXTREMELY good about this and when I called them and briefly explained what happened they shipped me another Grandstream no questions asked. This time I followed the tracking number, hounded my company's mail room, and picked it up promptly.
Set up: I decided to set up the Grandstream behind my router. I am pretty technically savvy, but I still found this a little tricky. I made extensive use of the documents on their support web site / knowledge base, which I found helpful though a little tricky to navigate. I had a number of technical difficulties during set-up, I think these would have happened with any VoIP service and mostly aren't unique to Phone Power: For one thing, all their instructions say when putting the Grandstream behind the router, to plug the router into the WAN port of the Grandstream, but in the end I didn't end up doing that and I don't believe that's the right thing to do based on what little I understand about networking. I had to dig around their support web site before finding the default Grandstream password is 123. I went back and forth between putting it in front of and behind my router but couldn't get everything working. I finally thought I had everything connected properly (I could access the grandstream and my router and the internet from the computer), but the Grandstream still wasn't registering with Phone Power. After eliminating all possible problems from my side, I finally figured that they must have the wrong adapter registered at phone power due to the shipping mix-up.
I called them the next morning as soon as they opened at 8 am - I had to wait in the phone queue for maybe 10 minutes. The first support person just took my phone number so another support person could call me - I thought this was a nice way to do it. The next person called me back within 5 or 10 minutes. I told him I thought the problem was due to the fact that I had a second adapter shipped to me. He looked into it, verified that that was indeed the problem, and had it fixed in a minute. I re-booted the Grandstream and it was working within a few minutes. I made a test call and it was all working!
I was generally happy with the service I received from Phone Power - their support staff were super-friendly and local to California (one had a nice valley girl twang).
Since then, my girlfriend has made many multi-hour calls (she's a talker over the past couple weeks to Canada and within San Francisco. They are all perfectly clear and as good as her old landline phone service. A call has never gotten dropped. Maybe once every 3 hours of talking there's a brief fade, but that's the worst it ever gets. My gf has a crappy old router that I gave her and I was initially concerned because the ATA is behind the router, but the phone still works great. There's not much to say here, I'm no audio expert, but I think the calls sound great.
As a techie, I also appreciate their functional and full-featured Web site. I build Web sites for a living, and their web site is cleanly laid out, works well, and is easy to use. They have a ton of neat features (voicemail to email, ring down to other numbers, etc.) that I am chomping at the bit to enable for my girlfriend (although she's not as interested in the features). I do kind of wish they offered some kind of soft-phone (maybe they do? i can't seem to find out anything about it.)
All in all, we're super-happy with Phone Power, and it's going to cost us less than $15/mo! (Btw, they advertise their $199 2-year special as being a time-limited offer, but the timer seems to reset every time it runs down!) I heartily recommend them to everyone looking for VoIP service!!
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Review by gworkman7
UPDATED: 33 days ago
member for 4 years, 789 visits, last login: a few hours ago
Tucson,Pima,AZ
$23 per month
about 14 days
"Good Feature Set / Reliable"
"None"
"Could be a good thing."
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I had my account hijacked by PhonePower due to Broadvox Direct dropping its customers on them. When I first recieved the e-mail notice, I contacted Phone Power to ensure the equipment would be sent to the correct address. This was on 9/10. On 9/14, I checked the tracking log and it showed that the equipment was sent to my old address. I contacted them again because my original box would no longer work after 9/15. They corrected the information (for the second time) and said it would be shipped out on 9/14. A few phone calls and two missed promises of the box being shipped and we are now up to 9/17 with no equipment and now, no service. I now have a tracking number for an overnight shipment of the equipment.
*** UPDATED 10/5/09
The equipment finally arrived on 9/21. So far, the service has been performing well. The only problem I had is that the volume is too loud. Called tech support and they had to log in to advanced settings (not available to end users) and make the adjustments. Everything is fine now.
Tech support was reached in less than 5 minutes, which was also a plus.
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ptrowski
Got Helix?
Premium
join:2005-03-14
Putnam, CT
clubs:
 ·VOIPo
 ·Metrocast Communic..
 ·AT&T DSL Service
·ViaTalk
| Re: Account HiJacked? said by TransitMan :Don't think so. Your old provider Broadvox simply sold/transfered you and everyone else to Phone Power, along with whatever records they had at the time, correct or not. Giving Phone Power a knock for something that may not be in their full control is not right. I think you missed this part-
"When I first recieved the e-mail notice, I contacted Phone Power to ensure the equipment would be sent to the correct address. This was on 9/10. "
--
"So, Lone Starr, now you see that evil will always triumph because good is dumb."
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage? »www.venganza.org | |
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TransitMan
Premium,MVM
join:2000-09-05
Dayton, OH
clubs:
·RoadRunner Cable
·Time Warner VOIP
·Earthlink TrueVoice
| Re: Account HiJacked? said by ptrowski :I think you missed this part- "When I first recieved the e-mail notice, I contacted Phone Power to ensure the equipment would be sent to the correct address. This was on 9/10. " And no, I didn't miss that part.
Even though you contacted Phone Power does not mean that they screwed up.
Transference of records, even though one may call in to make sure they are correct can and do become messed up.
Giving Phone Power low marks for this, in my opinion is a cheap shot at someone when they are trying to make something right from someone else dropping the ball, namely Broadvox, your old provider.
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Perhaps TODAY IS a good day to die!
Worf on the Defiant - ST First Contact
Proud Host of Crunchie #2. | |
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ptrowski
Got Helix?
Premium
join:2005-03-14
Putnam, CT
clubs: | Re: Account HiJacked? When the email specifically states to call PP and give them your new address, etc and then they go with the old records, then yes that is a PP issue. | |
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Review by dplantz
UPDATED: 40 days ago
member for 9.2 years, 3587 visits, last login: a few hours ago
Roslindale,Suffolk,MA
$23 per month (month by month)
about 5 days
"Great Voice Quality, Features that Comcast does not have, great tech support"
"Goes down every so often"
"Great value for the money, us based tech support"
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I ordered Phone Power after reading the reviews at DSL Reports. I wanted a cheaper phone service than Comcast after my promo ran out.
I have had voip since 2003 when I got Vonage. I have saved a ton of money using voip and love the features that pots does not have.
I have tried many voip companies over the last few years and wish that you could have ported numbers sooner than we could have.
Phone Power is one of those set and forget voip providers. I had issues when I got my ata, but tech support got me up in running in less than an hour of re-configureing the hardware. I love the feature set and the fact that I have outgoing caller id with name.
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 Review by Kinzoo
UPDATED: 42 days ago
member for 5.7 years, 322 visits, last login: a few minutes ago
Buffalo,Erie,NY
$18 per month (12 month contract)
about 7 days
"Good price, Good quality."
"Still none after over one year!!!"
"Great service, support & price"
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Good price, Talk to real support people.
Plug and play.
Phone Power has been terrific, was with VOIP.com before and there service & support was pitiful!!!
Well,
Its been a year and a half now.
PhonePower has not missed a beat.
I have not experienced any outages, that I am aware of!!
The few times I had to call customer support, they were 100%.
I would highly recommend this service to anyone.
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Review by darren3179
UPDATED: 62 days ago
member for 7.9 years, 18 visits, last login: 62 days ago
Plano,Collin,TX
$23 per month
about 3 days
"Cheap International calls, Amazing call quality, free second line"
"none so far"
"A far better choice than Vonage all around"
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I decided to go with Phone Power recently since I call the Philippines often and Vonage was charging me .24 per min for calls to philippine mobile. Two other deciding factors were that the call quality to international calls was subpar at best and many times i would have to dial upwards of 7 to 8 times to get the call to connect. This was with calls to Australia and the Philippines, domestic calls were never an issue.
Hookup was easy with the grandstream VoIP modem, hooked into my Westell router ( I have FiOS) and i was up and running. With Vonage the calls always sounded very faint and distant, it was obvious i was talking to someone 10,000 miles away. With Phone Power I was absolutely amazed when i call the philippines now it sounds like the person is in the next room, the clarity is phenomenal. Also its only .14 per minute to a mobile as opposed to .24 with Vonage.
Bottom line, for Domestic and International calls you cannot beat Phone Power.
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(18)
confused
Ireland is Ippecable
After you put up with their hold times, good luck trying to understand their tech support.