review needed: MagicJack

[disabledvetswife]

Hi,

I'm considering getting MagicJack for my fax line. I pay $27.42/month for my fax line now and rarely use it, but it is necessary for my home-based business.

Has anyone used this? I see all the negative reviews for voice-calls for MagicJack, but I'm not going to be using it for voice-calls.

Thanks.

[Thrifty Bee]

I’ve never used my Magic Jack for fax calls but I can tell you it says on the soft phone that if you intend on faxing that you’re internet needs to be DSL, Cable, or Wi-Fi and not a 3G air card trough a cell phone company.

I would say that the quality for faxing would be the same as voice calls which for us comes and goes. Some calls cut in and out, like a cell with bad reception and some calls are so clear that you wouldn’t be able to tell that we’re not using a regular phone line.

[joshmamabear]

I love, love it. We have cable internet and it works great. I've tried it to send and receive fax and it works; the free voice mail is great. I have enrolled for 911 accessibility. Best of all, I have not received any telemarketing calls since I dropped my landline in May I got mine at WAG with the $10 Bayer RRs while using fillers so OOP was very little. It is worth the small investment for me. I have unlimited long distance calls now which is a plus to save on my cell minutes when I'm home.

Some disadvantages: there are dropped calls every now and then but it doesn't bother me at all; I had to change phone number; but come to think of it, its a blessing in disguise since I am free from annoying telemarketers

[scentednights2002]

We wanted to but you have to have a lot of memory on your computer & we don't.

[loveweims]

We have it and a regular cable land line--but we are dropping the cable line and just going to go with MJ. For the last 2 months I have alternated which phone I make calls from and I cannot tell a difference at all in the quality of the phone call. We mostly use our cells for everything otherwise. It is a hassle to change phone number everywhere, but saving 600.00 a year will be worth it.

[thriftgurl65]

Thanks for asking about MagicJack. I was wondering what people thought about it and their experiences!

[Surveyin]

We were given MagicJack as a gift when we moved recently since we'd be making a lot of long distance phone calls to family. I believe they paid $20 for the year (free long distance and local calls). We've used it for 2 months now and it's been wonderful. We have had some dropped calls. I've noticed that when my kids are using the internet and I'm on the phone, my calls will sometimes get disconnected. The quality is generally pretty good. There are one or two people that I talk to that I always have poor reception. Occassionally someone will call and I can hear them, but they can't hear me.

I don't like that the answering machine is on the computer. If I'm not checking the computer all the time, I don't know that someone has left me a message. However, we can check our messages anywhere by logging into our email account. I don't know if there is a way to change it to a regular answering machine. My husband also said we could take the actual magicjack with us when we went on vacation and plug it into his lap top so we would have free phone service. We've haven't tried that yet. I also don't like having to leave my computer on all the time. We turn it off at night, but we have cell phones if anyone needed to get a hold of us.

Definitely some pros and cons, but to me the few annoyances are definitely worth the savings.

[nsbkim]

Some friends of mine tried it. They hated it. They had to use the phone number that it gave them which meant that everyone who wanted to call them would have to make a long distance call.