Comments on: magicJack: Could It Be the Asterisk Killer?

By: Randy

Randy — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 03:00:50 +0000

If your willing to work around it’s quirks, MagicJack is a great deal. We save $25 a month on our by dropping long distance service. We have our MagicJack connected to a dedicated low-end low power antequated PC that I use terminal services to manage. Three quirks: 1. On cold boot Magicjack doesnt always connect. Unplug for 30 seconds and plugging back always allows us to reconnect. 2. There is a slight delay in transmitting/converting voice to the other end. When first using MJ there’s a tendancy to jump on on top of others conversation. This is no proplem once you learn proper phone etiquette and patience. 3. Periodically we are unable to connect to people using small town mom/pop switchboards. No solution here. Just keep trying periodically. All in all, I’ve got to give MJ a thumbs up as it pays for itself every month. If your call are all IP to IP or to people using the major telecommunication companies you should have few problems.

By: Bob H

Bob H — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 04:50:47 +0000

2010-04-21
MJ works great. I wasn’t expecting the bonus voice mail to email feature. Only problem was automatic software installation didn’t work, so I ran the file manually.

By: Brent

Brent — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 20:09:52 +0000

Go to my website and read my story. The web is full of MagicJack horror stories, and the most important thing is that they don’t care about their customers. It is a waste of time and a waste of money.

By: SamF

SamF — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 22:07:18 +0000

MJ uses a standard SIP protocol. There are some links out there that will allow you to get the proxy, username and password you need to set up MJ as a SIP trunk in Asterisk. I’ve tested it and it works great!

By: RonV

RonV — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 01:48:35 +0000

Well I got my A400P with two FXO cards in it. Took me about 10 minutes to configure and adjust my dialplan to send long distance calls out the MagicJack port and it works. The dial delay is a bit longer than normal but at least I can now use it though my PBX.

I haven’t tried any inbound calls from the MagicJack to the PBX. I have both my landline and the MagicJack forwarded to my VoicePulse account so I really don’t have a need for the MagicJack to ring aginst the PBX at this time.

By: RonV

RonV — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 01:17:47 +0000

I am just waiting for my new FXO card to show up so I can have both my landline and magicjack connected to my pbx. As soon as I get it hooked up i’ll let everyone know how its working.

By: eric

eric — Tue, 26 May 2009 15:08:51 +0000

Hello
Magicjack is good or Ok,but it could be great,if the computer did not have to be on all the time to have magicjack work and even better the magicjack startup pop up ad’s would be done away with.now you have a great product simply solutions a greater receptive audience Plesae make it happen Thank you

By: Keith

Keith — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 18:09:32 +0000

I have had the MJ for about 4-5 months. I love the price, who doesn’t? At first I raved about it because it was so clean sounding and simple. But nowadays, I get so much jitter I am about to smash this piece of shite. I have had 2-3 times where I was unable to call toll free numbers. WTF? I chatted with tech support. After dicking around for a long time they finally suggested I do the update. I did the update, no change. Finally they said engineering is working on it, it’s a known problem. Thanks for sharing. It happened again last week. I join a lot of con calls so I have to be able to dial TF. But by far is the jitter, way too much. Even if no one is actively surfing the web or doing anything on the pc, it happens. I have optimized my pc but it doesn’t seem to matter. Next day, it might work fine. This thing is not ready for prime time. I have to order a cheap land line if there is such a thing.

By: Brian

Brian — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 21:02:08 +0000

I wanted to add that since I got the magicjack, I haven't received one telemarketing call, or weird calls like I used to get all the time even though I was on the "do not call" registry. This is a big plus for me.

By: Brian

Brian — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 20:54:09 +0000

I got Magicjack last July, and I’ve never had any problems with it. It’s better than my cell phone which has an echo and drops calls all the time–NOT so with Magicjack! There’s an offer on my popup that says I can buy 5 years of service for $59–I’m going to do that. This offer can’t be beat, and I would recommend it to anyone! I’ll take joe d’s advice and install the popup blocker software (it’s a little bit annoying). But NO complaints here–no computer crashes, no problems, just an almost-free phone service.

By: joe d

joe d — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 21:40:43 +0000

oh forgot to add that I love the fact it emails you a copy of your voice messages. I have the iphone and can hear my messages on it. great product and great features for below the average cost of of one months service to a lane line or other voip service.

By: joe d

joe d — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 21:37:59 +0000

I have had the mj for 3 months and have set it up to use my existing home phone line as well as have installed a program to stop the mj software from popping up. it’s called magicblock and I downloaded it from download.com. the product hasn’t giving me a problem at all works fine and worth the money.
my only complaint was the software pops up with ever incoming and outgoing call. thanks to the free software that stops that it’s now great. there are many sites that are devoted to hacking this product and making it more user friendly. do a google search to find them allot of good advice can be found on them.

By: FuriousGeorge

FuriousGeorge — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 06:58:10 +0000

The comparison doesnt make sense to me. It assumes asterisk and the magicjack have the same target audience. I think it's apples and oranges. Asterisk is a "phone system" or Private Branch eXchange, more correctly. It doesnt provide voip service at all, but rather acts as your own mini phone company. You take lines from "the street", be they analog, VoIP (SIP, IAX, h323, even Skype), ISDN, and/or t1, and you interface those with your "internal lines", be they analog phones, sip phones, h323, skinny, etc This helps business because they can assign routing like: inbound calls ring here. outbound calls use this service, unless its full or unavailable, or 911, in which case it uses this or that "channel". Try this: plug the analog end of the magic jack into your Asterisk PBX, and you just added a "line". See, they not only coexist, they compliment eachother, in a dirty hackish sort of way: Remote Phone < -analog_or_digital-> phone company < -digital-> magic jack < -analog-> asterisk < -digital_or_analog-> Local Phone Considering you are dealing with 8khz x 8-bit mono signal at best (assuming remote end isnt on cell phone) this is probably not gonna sound pretty. Its entirely possible that if anyone cared enough someone would write a linux module for it, and you wouldnt even need the "jack". Just peer your server with "the jack's" and call away. That would be 100% digital, and is how it should work. You would have a chan_magicjack and make/take calls like you normally would with asterisk. Asterisk is pretty clearly a Phone System, intended for business use, while the magicjack is a niche VoIP service provider.

By: Chip

Chip — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 17:30:19 +0000

I’ve had the magicjack for 4 days now, And to this point I’d give it a mixed review. It was simple to install and use. The phone clarity is real good. My main issue is that the software does really suck. This thing does not cohabitate with any of my media programs – napster, iTunes, Media Center – it crashes them all. Literally every time. I may keep it anyway, and just plug it in when I want to use it to make a long distance call or send a fax, but it certainly doesn’t seem to be reliable as a primary line

By: james

james — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 06:52:44 +0000

i want to thank everyone for posting on here. although there have been a few good reports, most are bad or mediocre at best, and i don’t need another mediocre product that takes me hours to get set up.
i make $45 per hour, and if i’m screwing around with this thing for 5 or 6 hours, i might as well pay for a landline.
btw, cricket cell phones also suck. same problems as most of the above commenter’s.

By: Gene Chang

Gene Chang — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 23:55:21 +0000

I messed up the voicemail system right after the first hour I got the Jack. Voicemail is not picking up initially, then after a few MagicFix and upgrades, I cannot set up the voicemail. Calls from the connected phones / softPhone gets forwarded. So the voicemail serves as a calling card when automatic call forwarding is not enabled, prompting me to enter a number. Then call will be directed to that number, but that did not ring, only the voicemail of that number pick up – A calling card function. When I enabled the call forwarding function, the calls are forwarded without errors.

I bought the Jack for only two reasons. To make calls and to forward the incoming calls to my cell phone. Don’t even think about 3-way calling, and most of the other features. Vonage does BETTER.

I do want to try the FREE calling to the States from overseas. That’s another (3rd) reason I want to try.

By: Nitin Thakkar

Nitin Thakkar — Sat, 17 May 2008 00:15:22 +0000

Magic Jack SSUUCCKKSS – BIG TIME – I have to uninstall my Internet Security Software, Music Match JukeBox and Skype. The piece of CRAP still did not work. Plugged this into another PC, different USB Ports. Unplug/Replug, download updates, recovery tools – 2 hours of tech support – no replacement – just an RMA – I still pay shipping. DO NOT BUY inspite of good reviews

By: Robert Marchand

Robert Marchand — Wed, 14 May 2008 03:33:27 +0000

I bought a MagicJack and experienced problem after problem with it since. First, it arrived 30 day later and never worked properly. Moreover, I have lost about 20 hours total chatting with them without any results. Secondly, they refused to replace it, even though they admit it is defective. Thirdly, they refuse to give me back my money.

If I can recommend 1 thing to everybody that reads this, it is to stay away from that company and its products.

By: Beth

Beth — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 16:24:56 +0000

I have had mj for 3 months now, all of a sudden on april 11th i am unable to make phone calls to 4 of the towns nearest me, including the town i live in, but i can make phone calls to other towns and out of state. everyone can call me, no problem, i just cannot call them, i hear the phone ringing but when i go see these people, they say their phone never rang or registered on caller id or anything. i have chatted 5 times with the company, and the problem has been escalated to engineering 4 of the 5 times with the response that i will get an email w/in 24-48 hours, I have never received a response. Finally today I got the phone number off of the BBB website and left a voicemail for that contact. Waiting to see what happens, I was so happy with this product before this random problem started on the 11th, I hate to give it up and pay for monthly phone service again. hth someone

By: skooter

skooter — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 17:59:56 +0000

I’ve had MJ for 30days now. It works on my winXP desktop and works on my Vista laptop. I had no installation problems, nor issues with current firewall or antivirus software. My only complaints: (1) occasionally people say they can’t hear me &/or there is an echo (a reboot of computer fixes both problems). (2) no setting to disable pop-up window during use. (3) Once I had to unplug & reset modem/router (may have been an ISP issue). (4) No support for faxing. BOTTOMLINE: great little device – I’m a happy camper.

By: Dan

Dan — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 05:29:14 +0000

My experience with Magic Jack is horrible. I got the device through signing up on their site for a free 30-day trial. It came quickly, I hooked it up and it re-directed me to their promotions page. I tried to register through it and could not. I tried to log in to their on-line my.magicjack.com page and was informed my e-mail and password that they sent to me are not valid.
I contacted customer support and "chatted" with five different people in a two-hour period. None of them would/could help. They had me install the software six times total and finally one of them told me that they are having problems with engineering and my problem would be fixed in 30 to 60 minutes. Obviously, it wasn’t. I asked for a phone number to talk to a person and was told there are no phones, only online chats.
This company and product was a frustrating nightmare for several hours and I am returning the product. Maybe I could have worked out the bugs if I could have gone into my account, but no one could seem to understand that I could not log into the account. They all wanted to run through the set-up steps. I even spoke to a level two tech.
One of the techs said I was not in the company’s database. Another one said I was in the database and he informed me that according to his records I have received my MagicJack in the mail.
Receiving it was not the problem, I explained, using it was the issue. Trying to communicate with the techs was interesting and would have been funny if I wasn’t getting steamed.
So, without being able to register, I couldn’t get a phone number, set up anything etc. If I can’t even get it set up on my account, I am sure any other support will be nonexistent.
I’m returning it and will block any attempt they make to charge my credit card.
I also informed the company that I am a newspaper reporter who fully intends to write about my experiences.

By: Jack

Jack — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 18:14:00 +0000

I also had issues right from the get go. Could not get the MJ to ring for inbound calls. Spent 4 hours with tech support. Tried 4 different types of phones both hardwire and wireless, zero result.
Fedex’ed back for refund. Also they hide their software so, to undelete it, you really have to dig. My opinion: great idea but performance sucks.

By: Kyle

Kyle — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 04:16:47 +0000

I received my MJ up here in the Leaf Nation (another playoff year missed :o( ) and it installed on an XP SP2 machine in about one minute. It even upgraded during the install process. Ingress and egress calls have been working wonderfully with no "chirps", "crackle" or annoying delay (actually the delay is so short it is not really noticed). It exceeded my expectations, and the voice message system works as well or better than many corporate systems. Voice messages are also emailed to me which is really sweat. Only once did outbound calls stop. I kept getting "three beeps" ... I think that is some sort of connection error. Anyway, I reset my router and it hasn't happened since. My experience has been excellent. I have made wonderful uninterrupted connections to friends across this great continent and border. My sound quality is better than mobile, and sometimes as good as a land line. I expect the product and/or service to simply improve over time. I hope my good experience continues.

By: Stuart Friedman

Stuart Friedman — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 03:14:14 +0000

I bought one for my technically illiterate friend in the UK to basically use when traveling. The price was so good, that I bought a second one as a toy and to loan out to family members leaving the country. $100 got me five years worth of service. I am not sure if the company will last that long, but it is looking good at the moment.

What I discovered, however, is that the unit uses the Tiger chipset and works well with Eyebeam and Xlite software as well. Just rename the autorun file to stop magicjack from launching.

I don’t recommend this as a landline substitute but as a another tool in a road warriors case, I think it is a pretty good screwdriver.