Archive for July, 2008
Do you believe in Magic?
Posted by Hometownpulse | Filed under Technology
Do you believe in Magic? I do .. well MagicJack that is. Sometimes I am up at weird hours of the night and happen to catch all sorts of infomercials. One night a particular infomercial caught my eye. They were talking about a small USB device that would allow you to make phone calls anywhere in the US & Canada for FREE. The cost? $39.95 for the device which includes a year of service. Each year after that you only pay $19.95.
So I will admit .. I was VERY skeptical and changed the channel. A couple weeks later I saw the infomercial again and thought about it for a bit and then changed the channel.
Then something happened .. I got my latest Time Warner cable bill. Now granted I have Turbo Road Runner, 2 Digital Phone Lines, & Digital Cable. My bill was well over $200/month!!
This led me to do some research on the internet for other people that may have tried MagicJack. I found the following forums: Unofficial MagicJack Forums. On there were numerous people with good and bad experiences with the MagicJack device.
So then I started doing the math. If I discontinued all of my Time Warner cable services EXCEPT Turbo Road Runner my bill would drop to $54.95/month. Plus $19.95/year for the MagicJack phone service. That is a savings of $150/month!!
So I pulled the trigger and ordered my MagicJack last week. It came in the mail in a few days and I set it up on Monday. For testing purposes I decided to set up a separate PC instead of trying it out on my main computer in the house. (Just in case anything went wrong)
It is not a powerhouse of a PC
- 999 Mhz CPU
- 256 MB Ram
- 20GB HDD
- 52x CDROM
- Windows XP Home
Setting MagicJack up was just as easy as the instructions said. Just plug it into your USB slot and follow the directions. Even with this low-end PC the MagicJack seems to work flawlessly. I had no issues installing it.
My only choices for phone numbers in my area were Buffalo (716) or Syracuse (315). I opted for the 716 phone number for now.
So far I think the quality of the calls I make and receive on the MagicJack are very good and acceptable. I am going to test it out for a couple more weeks before we decide to pull the plug on all our other cable services.
When we decide to make that jump I will definitely post about the experience.