MagicJack is just one of several options. They advertise heavily to
the senior citizen crowd, if that means anything. It might be just the
thing to go along with your Jitterbug cell phone and knife set.
Sorry, as somebody employed by "old world" telephone and heavily
involved in the technology, I tend to be a little snarky about
MagicJack. Just a little snarky. I reserve my major snarks for the
cable-tv companies--the slumlords of telecommunications.
The option I prefer is to have minimal telephone service through the
local provider, with a decent DSL connection. As the cellphone is my
primary mode of communication, I use the cellphone almost exclusively.
If you REALLY want to have a "land-line for long-distance calls" that
a cellphone isn't satisfactory for, you can have a "MagicJack"
equivalent through your cellphone provider, so it's lumped in with
just that one bill and can also be had as a deal-maker for free or
nominal cost.
My biggest beef with MagicJack style services isn't the secondary fees
and little gotchas that come up, but the quality of service. The
Internet is NOT built for real-time streaming communications. It can
take longer to establish the call and the voice quality can be pretty
horrid. Worse, though, is
the
latency,
and lo.......................................... ackets.
It can really suck.
Voice over IP (VoIP) is not the same thing as Voice over Internet.
Both use VoIP as the technique. But the Internet is the
wild-wild-west. We telephone companies are converting over to VoIP
switches, but the difference is that we have isolated communication
"trunks" for that service that doesn't touch the Internet traffic.
Even with the isolated network, we still have weird stuff happening,
but nothing compared to the haphazard nature of trying to get free
telephone service to work over the Internet.
Another factor, which most people don't realize, is that the "last
mile" technology of "Fiber to the Home" is pretty well meaningless.
Once you get back to the serving office, you and your hundreds or
thousands of neighbors are all stuffed into the same backhaul pipe
which is sometimes a fraction of what is really needed. This is less
true with the Big companies that have their own private state or
nationwide fiber networks, but the local CO-OP, CLEC or Municipal
telephone company has to buy their connection to get out of town and
to the Internet NAPs. The "oversold" nature of those pipes can be
downright horrid. It doesn't matter if you have a 20Mb DSL connection
if your DSLAM is served by 4 T1s either. (6Mb). At the big-honkin
old-world telephone company I work for, I'm slinging 10Gb connections
around like they are candy in a parade.
--
Ken Norton
ken@xxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.zone-10.com
--
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