A review.
Moderators: Bill Smith, Pilot
A review.
I purchased a Magic Jack in Nov 2008 and I love it. All was not rosy at first but things improved. I brought the unit home from a trip to the USA and hooked it up to my computer and upgraded the driver. It worked somewhat well for a little time and then it got to be terriblle. I live in Edmonton Alberta and when I made calls to Edmonton there was a lot of poor quality of sound issues to the point of some people not being able to understand us. This was very frustrating to say the least but it worked well to most other cities ... only once in awhile faultering. My wife was driving me nuts as she phones to friends in Edmonton a lot and the issues were fairly bad. At one point I was just about to abandon the MagicJack but that night I recieved a email from my ISP that my speed was being improved on my service. It did not say when but the next day the MagicJack worked perfectly. I checked my ISPs speed and they had increased it 50% and from that point on the MagicJack has not missed a beat. We have called Europe many times and have had absolutely perfect quality at extremely low cost. My wife has gone from cursing it to wanting to buy one for all her friends in Europe (calling locally is no longer a problem). We love it!! Just make sure your ISP is delivering a quality service because MagicJack cannot deliver great service if your ISP does not. I went from 5000 KBPS download to 7500 KBPS and uploading is at 500 kbps and now this great little device works great. (You can check your speed at speedtest.com) I was told by MagicJack and other VOIP providers that speeds of 5000 kbps download and 400 upload were adequate but for the last 3 years I always had issues until now. Speed makes a difference ... if you are having difficulty with VOIP or the MagicJack don't jump to say these technologies are the problem as it may be your ISP that is the problem. Check it out and if you have a quality service from your ISP than I would highly recommend a MagicJack ... all I can say is WOW now. A couple of bucks a month and a great service ... fantastic.
Indeed, if the PC that hosts your MJ cannot get clear use of 80kbps in each direction (64kbps payload + 16kbps control) you will enjoy poor voice quality and failed calls. If your upstream speed before this upgrade was only slightly more than the required 80kbps, any use of the internet anywhere else in your household could have interfered with your MJ service. Congratulations on your success.
I have also realized I may have had a problem with it due to plugging it in to a USB hub. The hub divides the amount of data that can be transferred thru the 1 original port by the number of ports on the hub. I would recommend users plug the device into a USB port located directly on the computer. I found this problem when trying to transfer files from different devices using the hub and then without. Transferring some of the files was up to 10 times longer using the hub than when devices were directly connected. I am very happy with my Magicjack and have ordered another 2 for convenience purposes. My belief is the product works fine but there are a lot of technical issues that may exist which can affect the performance. Users need to know the device works and if it does not then finding and then solving the issues will be required.
Re: A review.
Hi,wacker wrote:I checked my ISPs speed and they had increased it 50% and from that point on the MagicJack has not missed a beat.
Any chance you are on Shaw cable? If so, Shaw increased our basic cable speeds by 50% a few weeks ago and MJ call quality has improved to being totally usable for local and long distance (mostly in Canada). A coincidence? The new equipment probably addresses congestion issues accounting for better VOIP. Speed test now is showing about 15,000 kps down and 450 kps up. It'd be interesting to see how many other Shaw subscribers noticed a marked improvement in MJ call quality.
A properly functioning hub does no such thing. A hub takes any data signal coming in on any port and echoes it outbound to every port (including the one it came in on) on the hub. A hub will only slow traffic down when there is contention from other devices on that hub.wacker wrote:The hub divides the amount of data that can be transferred thru the 1 original port by the number of ports on the hub.
So, if you are using your hub strictly to inject more electrical power to make the MJ dongle happy, you will not suffer any decreased performance by having inserted the hub.
On the other hand, if you have put your scanner, printer and external hard drive on the other ports of that hub, those other devices will indeed rob bandwidth from the MJ dongle. More so, because they will introduce collisions in the hub, which will necessitate retransmissions by the various devices that collided, further exacerbating the slowdown. Also, if you have inserted a non-powered hub it will reduce the amount of power available to the MJ dongle, further reducing the dongle's ability to do its job.