Happy Days

[gators5]

Happy Days are here again. It has been a difficult five days with MJ. Probably 50% of my calls on Monday and Tuesday were dropped. It didn’t matter if I made the calls or received them. Other times when I placed a call it went to dial tone. This was a continuation of the MJ problems and inconsistent service.
Tuesday night was like Christmas as “Brown” instead of Santa delivered a box from Costco with “ooma” in it.
I had never heard of ooma until about a month ago by reading a post on this site. Not wanting to go from bad to worse I read every review I could—Costco, Best Buy, Amazon, publications, you name it if it had ooma in it I read it. I even had a daily Google alert on ooma.
I had to do something in order to save my marriage, that is how bad MJ had become.
I had MJ for nine months and there wasn’t a week during all that time that MJ worked the way it was promised. MJ even sent me a new one in case my original one was defective. My DSL provider gave me a new modem to insure it wasn’t there problem. I took it to other parts of the US and used different computers with the same spotty service. All the speed tests said everything should be fine.
I’ve been using ooma now for 48 hours and the difference is incredible. Everyone says the audio sounds just like a landline. It also has real caller ID where I can see who is calling and those I call know it is me. I’m going to try it for 30 days to see if ooma lives up to its billing.
I wanted to go back to the olden days, the day before I bought MJ when I gave no thought at all to making or receiving a call. If the phone rang I never wondered if I would have echoes or choppy audio. If I made calls I never wondered if it would go to dial tone or calls would be dropped.
Until I read this site I didn’t know about high end routers that you had to splash with a tomatoe. I thought a thin client was a customer who wasn’t fat.
I sure didn’t see the need to invest heavily in a product that needed all this additional support just to get it to work correctly. It is kind of like a car, put it in drive and it goes forward and that’s what my expectations were of making a phone call and using MJ. Regrettably it didn’t do that.
All of that being said, ooma was easy to install, like hooking up a new TV.
If it goes bad on me I’ll let you know. The one good thing about Costco you can take it back with no questions asked.
Hope for all of you that MJ fixes its problems and it will become a real plug and play device.

[laserjobs]

You Ooma shills crack me up

Can't you pimp your products somewhere else?

[gators5]

As I said I learned about it by reading posts on this site.

[gators5]

If MJ worked like promised, there wouldn't be a need for this site. Don't be so defenisve about MJ.

[mberlant]

ooma and MJ are both proof that VoiP is still young and that there is plenty of room in the market for anyone clever enough to carve out a new niche. ooma may go bust, like SunRocket before it. MJ may collapse under the weight of the pyramid. However, we'll enjoy what we can for as long as it remains alive.

I hope that gator gets his $200 worth before they go out of business (only 10 months payback, compared with Vonage and the like). And I hope that we all get our $40 worth in the first year (2 months payback) and $20 worth (one month payback) every year after that. Either way, I don't see ooma or MJ as a sucker bet. I just won't throw more into the pot than I can afford - like by porting a cherished phone number to either of these services.

[gators5]

An update. Testing both MJ & ooma for the last 10 days. MJ continues to have echoes, choppy audio and an occasional dropped calls.
ooma is like Ma Bell, you pick up the phone and make a call and it works perfectly. The same when the phone rings, you answer it and there are no issuses with the quality of the audio.
Do like that ooma has name & number caller ID.
I was going to test both for 30 days, but if I continue to get similar results over the nexxt few days I will be an exclusive ooma user.

[maine-iac]

I was going to test both for 30 days, but if I continue to get similar results over the nexxt few days I will be an exclusive ooma user.

Good. Maybe you can take Saxman with you.

[az2008]

An update. Testing both MJ & ooma for the last 10 days. MJ continues to have echoes, choppy audio and an occasional dropped calls.
ooma is like Ma Bell,

Nobody has to put $250 in Ooma's pockets to discover that. Just pay $10 to fund a prepaid Skype or vbuzzer.com account. They make a great and inexpensive fall back for MagicJack.

MagicJack's voice quality has been very bad the past few days. The deterioration isn't predictable. It was bad Friday during the day. Really bad early evening. Good later in the evening (but not late night). Proxies which had been very good 4-5 weeks ago were terrible.

I believe it will get better. There's no way Dan can sell this kind of unusable quality. But, it's really difficult to figure out what is happening. I went to Radio Shack a couple days ago. They said MJ sells very briskly, with few returns.

Part of me suspects Dan has a way to give priority to new customers so they don't experience the poor quality the rest of us do. But, when I got my 2nd Jack in December, it was homed to a region with poor quality. It had poor quality (although not as bad as today's quality).

Mark

[laserjobs]

I have a friend who tried Ooma and the international calls are horrible. Not only do they start billing as soon as you dial, you get charged even if the call does not connect. What it means is Ooma is using cheap gray routes to terminate calls which is illegal in some countries. He promtly returned it to Costco after he figured out what they were upto.

Bottom line is Ooma is upto some sketchy stuff and stay away.