atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums VOIP Phones & IP PBX VoIP & Cloud Phones, Hosted PBX, General IP Phones Magic Jack a Piece of Krap

I bought the Magic Jack and it is a piece of krap. People I call say it sounds awful, and from my end it sounds like an echo chamber.

sorry to hear that, it works really good for me. I use it on a comcast cable connection and I find it to be well worth the money but not 100% like a pots line.

You may want to do a board search on Magic Jack..there was a pretty long thread about it and most seemed to have good luck with it.

I have Comcast cable too. What kind of router or firewall do you have? Is it SIP aware?

Wow, I haven't had any trouble at all with mine, even when using it at home on "es Comcastico". Even in hotel rooms using wifi, mine has done very well. Sorry to hear that you are having trouble with yours. In here, more good things have been said than bad about the Magic Jack, so maybe you got a bad unit?

arc, I, too, have little to complain about. Sometimes dialtone is delayed, the other end sometimes hears little repittious beeps, and you MUST have a DTMF phone/systemm that sends tones as long as the button is held down, in order to navigate AA/VM. But, for $40 the first year and $20/year after that, WOW. Have you talked to MagicJack, or checked the diagnostics info on their website.
By the way, I'm on TWC, and right now my speed is down UNDER 2800 KBPS, a far cry from the 'up to 7.0 KBPS', but the MJ still works fine. Even when I'm connected to some web site through AOL.
And, I'm running speed checks in preparation for calling TWC yet again about discounts for lack of even 1/2 the speed they tout. (Their own speed check site is the slowest, fancy that.) But I digress and almost hijacked the post. Apologies to you and everyone else. John C.

"'up to 7.0 KBPS'

Don't you mean MBPS? :toast:

I have had good luck with my MJ also.
It's not a POTS line, but for 20 bucks a year it works good enough for me when I'm on the road in a motel with no cell service.

hotextec, right you are, 7 Mbps, not Kbps. DUH! For all you folks, threats of corporation Commission seems to get the fastest results. Well, that and the fact that I'm pretty sure my file says; "This customer is retired and home all day, most days." (And has too much time on his hands, he COULD make life tough for us! He has nothing better to do than make our lives a living hell!) Man, it's nice to be able to raise he-- steadily when I can't get what I want!
By the way, the comments I get from people who have the ability and experience to make a reasonable judgement, say that I sound like VOIP, or an overseas call of 10-20 years ago. Clear, but a definite difference in sound quality from local/LD dial up. John C.

What I can do to improve the sound of the Magic Jack?

arc, have you browzed the MJ web site, like I suggested? And even contacted their tech support? I had a problem re losing audio on my computer speakers, and the answer was in the FAQ's.
Remember, this IS a computer thingie, and like a lot of computer thingie's, sometimes a little fine-tuning is in order. John C.

Yes I have. There is no support. The best suggestion is to return it for another. I don't see how they can provide a quality unlimited service for $20/yr.

I have a Magic Jack question. I use one here in the office as a failover in case my PRI goes down, works fine. BUT, at home, where I am way too cheap to pay Qwest for a telephone line (we use our cell phones!), we have Direct TV, in order to buy PPV's you need a telephone line, will the Magic Jack work for the Direct TV authorizations??

More than likely it will not. The Magic Jack is a VoIP device which doesn't carry analog data very reliably.

Thanks Ed, I figured that but one never knows!! BTW, We've been able to get modems functioning over soft switch provided PRI trunks using speeds lower than 33.2 and using v.90 or 92 modems.

and two Eds are better than one!!!

Ed M

"and two Eds are better than one!!!"

Boo, that is a NASTY pun!

I am able to navigate AA/VM's on my MJ just fine. but I use a good ol' analog S/L phone that sends a tone as long as I hold the button down! If I dial with short tones, usually 'doesn't happen'. John C.

arc,the $$$ is not worth the discussing, altho some of the more 'accountable' here can probably explain it to your satisfaction. Maybe some BS about making it up in volume. You know, if you lose enough, the government will bail you out! Send it back and get another one. Hey, for $20/year, I'm happy! John C.

Empty your temporary Internet files, run a Defrag and do a full power down. I spend 15 minutes every other Saturday doing this routine and the MJ is outstanding. I have in-laws in California, Montana, Utah, Texas and South Carolina. The wife is on it constantly and all her complaints went away once I started the "maintenance routine"

I do this constantly. It makes no difference. Magic Jack works like krap out of the box. I bought the Magic Jack to see if I could recommend it to business clients, and the the answer is definitely NOT!

I wouldn't be too hard in Magic Jack. Like always, anytime you use the internet for VoIP it's a crap shoot. If it works for you be surprised, if it doesn't- don't be.

-Hal

mine worked great out of the box and still does , quality is as good as verizon dt

I wouldn't think of recommending it to customer , to many uncontrollable variables


exactly , I had a customer with vonage , worked great for about two years then it all went to hell
changed routers , changed isp's (twice) never could get the problems resolved

Wait, what? Either you currently have 5 wives or you have been married 5 times and still keep in touch with the x inlaws.

Maybe he's referring to his wife's brothers and sisters, his sibling's spouses, and other 'extended' family. Atho I would have expected a more 'Southern' concentration. John C.

Yes, yes. I should have been more specific. Brother & sister in-laws. Seems once they hit 18, they picked the furthest state from mom&pop and any other member of the family!

Back to the Magic Jack though...
We have one set up as the first outgoing line here at work. We call from NY to the entire county and we don't seem to have any problems that a clear-cache & reboot once a week doesn't fix. Without realizing it I have used it for modem connections to units in a few states. To my surprise even that works fine, mostly...

I guess it is just like any other product. Some people love it, people some hate it. Use it if it works for you, or toss it in the bottom of the junk drawer with the rest of the gadgets tried.

Any other comments?

Mine works fine as well.

Mine worked for a short while then quit working I plugged it in the other day and did an update it it seems to be working again but quality is not as good.

Mine just keeps workin'. Only complaint is that the 'puter has to stay on 24/7. But, if I don't want that, there's always Vonage, at a higher price. John C.

They are selling them at the mall here now!

love mine so far

Its always worked well for me. My offiece when I needed it, hotels when traveling, my daughters house.

My biggest problem with MJ is its annoying when it keeps popping up every few minutes. The only way I have been able to stop it is unplug the MJ.

I found that if I touched the mj or the usb cable, it would reboot. If I stayed away from it, I didn't have the problem.

Mine is 2 days old and works with no problem.

First out of wireless laptop to 2500 set.

Then I moved it to desktop with 2500,then to Partner and also fine.

I ordered one online and my Comcrap broadband in Michigan seemed insufficient to sustain a usable QoS for VoIP... my voice popped as though I was experiencing a 10% packet loss (a 1/10 second pop of silence at 1 second intervals). I returned it (they don't make that intuitively obvious, but I got there!).

Upon arriving in Florida, I found they were now selling them at Radio Shack and I tried again. My Comcrap in Florida apparently has better bandwidth and it works fine (almost). The voice quality is very good although my recorded voicemail name and greeting are a little spotty, but I make and receive calls pretty seamlessly and no one has complained of my calls.

HOWEVER, the critical problem I ran into today (Day 12 of my 30 day Money Back period) is that I called into an AT&T Conference Calling System where I must enter touch-tone digits for an "ID" and a "Passcode" to enter the conference call meetings that I must attend for work. For unknown reasons, that system would not correctly recognize the touch-tone digits as I entered them... and I couldn't get into my meeting! (Had to use my limited minutes on my cell phone to get in!).

For OTHER systems that require entry of touch-tone digits, it seems to work fine (i.e. MagicJack voicemail, other voicemail systems, a couple of ARU's I've had to call, etc.), however, the main reason I have the MagicJack is for these conference calls, so unless I can figure out how to resolve this, it is unusable for my purposes.

In my rudimentary troubleshooting, I tried two different handsets.. one of which is an old Slimline Touch-Tone phone that will sustain the touch-tone signal for as long as the button remains pressed. Neither worked. I tried pressing the buttons slowly, with long intervals between digits... that didn't work. I DID get "lucky" once and got my "ID" to be recognized, but I couldn't get the "Passcode" to be recognized to enter my meeting. I also tried all the different USB ports on my computer... no change.

I did try the MagicJack site and even had a "Live Tech" in chat with me. The first Tech I had, "Harry", quickly passed off my highly detailed question to "Level 2". After a few minutes, I had "Lewis" in chat and he asked a couple of questions before providing their final official feedback, which was "I apologize, the magicJack will not work with AT&T conference calling system."

I'm about to go to their site and "Apply the Latest Fixes", but I don't really expect that to make any difference either. If I can't get this fixed, I'll be returning this one too (but directly to Radio Shack... MUCH easier!) and will be setting up my old Vonage system.

Does anyone here have any ideas? Anyone... anyone?????

EDIT: Update - I just thought of another issue. While talking to my wife, I was disconnected at exactly (and mysteriously) 1 hour, zero minutes, and 1 second. Does this thing have a built in timer to disconnect after an hour or something. That will also kill me on conference calls (although, not so much with the wife).

EDIT: Update #2 - I suppose I should mention that I'm running 64bit MS Vista on my HP Pavilion. The presence of that OS, I'm sure, does not help my odds of success with the product. In breaking news.. I just tried it on my WinXP SP2 Dell machine. No change.

Does anyone here have any ideas? Anyone... anyone?????

Well Cheapskate, true to your name you get what you pay for.

-Hal

Thank you - Very helpful. But truthfully, I expect to get way more than I pay for. That's the allure of this product. Anyone have any constructive comments?

I don't think it's going to work for you Jack. I have found several apps that it won't work on, I couldn't get it to hear the digits dialed by my voicemail system to notify me of a message, I could monitor the line and hear the tons, but could not break dial tone on the magic jack. That said it works well about 90% of the time for general long distance voice calls, when it doesn't I hang up and dial again and it usually works fine. I have found that it eats up a lot of memory so I use it on an old laptop in the basement and feed the line into my phone system so it doesn't slow down my desktop.
Hal is right though, you are lucky when you get what you pay for, and with the low price of this thing, I'd say you get more. It just doesn't do something you and I would like it to do.

It is what it is. A cheap toy that will deliver voice most of the time in measured doses. It isn't designed to be much more than that. Forget the DTMF signaling through auto attendants/voice mails.

I have run across the same problems with the ATT conference calls. I was able to get it to work if actually used my mouse to press the buttons on the computer screen and did not use the phone.

I worked for me a while ago, I am not sure it still will, but hey, it is worth a try.

I would love to know if it still works.

jknuts1

I've only used my MJ a few times... and yeah no DTMF, and the sound is kinda strange...It's top notch on a dedicated broadband line, but more often than not I'd have to use it on wireless where the sound gets pretty bad... but I mean it's a neat little toy $20 a year whatever. I'd never switch my Vonage home lines for it, but it's come in handy on the road especially at a certain hotel I frequent that doesn't have LD service in the rooms.

I have 2 laptops one old and one new when i hook the mj up to the old one i can make calls but the person that i called cant hear me although I can hear them. When i plug it into the new laptop it works fine crystal clear so i think that the computer that you use defenitly effects the quality of your conversation