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Anyone have this service of phone over the internet? Or had it?
My mother passed away and I am not keeping her telephone service. The rate for a landline is awful plus everytime I pick up the phone there is charges as I live in the middle of two areas and each of them is long distance!
Vonage is a rip-roaring rip-off. There are alternatives that cost much less.
On MagicJack, I don't trust their business model. I expect them to either get bought (which I think has been their plan all along) or go under, which puts the best case scenario at a price hike. Add to that the fact that you're dependent on your Windows machine always being on, working properly and having the resources available to do the voice transcoding, and it's not an ideal long-term solution at all.
As for VoIP in general, it works fine, as long as you have a stable provider and a reliable and fast Internet connection. I have about a dozen phone numbers terminating in my PBX machine for various purposes, and we've logged over 340 hours of calls since I put this machine online in March, without experiencing a single problem.
As long as you have a solid Internet connection with reasonable upload speed, and a provider that cares about the level of service they provide, it's a no-brainer financial decision between going VoIP or sticking with the telco.
For residential service, I recommend Callcentric. They have an all-you-can-eat inbound plan for $6 per month. They also have an unlimited inbound/outbound plan for about the same as Vonage, but unless you do a LOT of outbound calling (and I mean a LOT), it's a much better value to pay-per-minute for outbound calls. You do need to BYOH (Bring Your Own Hardware) - a one time cost of about $35-40 or so. I can help with recommendations there if needed.
For business service, I recommend Vitelity. I can't speak highly enough of the level of service we've received from them. Call quality is top notch, excellent rates and we haven't had a single problem with either inbound or outbound termination since we started using them last year.
If you want/need more info, feel free to DM me. I've got some experience in this area and I'm more than happy to help. I'll also try to keep an eye on this thread, but if it gets pushed down the list too fast, I may not see that there's new responses.
Anyone have this service of phone over the internet? Or had it?
My mother passed away and I am not keeping her telephone service. The rate for a landline is awful plus everytime I pick up the phone there is charges as I live in the middle of two areas and each of them is long distance!
Thanks.
I've used it for I think a total of 4 years now.. maybe less, maybe more.. Um.. the bonus is it generally works though I saw some weirdness with it a few years back..
I wouldn't recommend that magicjack I'm pretty sure there another one of the ones to go out of business.. vonage is technically maybe going to go out of business based on the talk in the dslreports.com there are highly unprofitable and facing some huge debt..
I'm trying to migrate away from vonage to a service called future-nine, they don't have the best website.. but I think they actually might be in business say 5 years from now.. it's quite possible vonage will be too.. I currently have 4 lines with vonage and 1 with future-nine pending things go well I will port all my lines to future-nine..
If you really want to deal with vonage and save money the only way to do it cost effectively is to call in to customer service complain your going to quit and get offers of unlimited for $15 a month.. $5 a month and a penny a minute etc.
Future-nine is $5 a month or $75 a year and a penny a minute incoming minutes are like 3000 free.. buy a device from them for $30 or buy your own.. if you want to read up on them try dslreports.com
It's a box you buy for a flat rate and hooks up to your Internet/DSL and creates unlimited calling. I'm getting mine installed next month and their forums are blazing up with good reviews. The upgraded plan sounds nice too with International calling and multiple lines.
Check the plans yourself.. the $75 plan has 250 in outgoing minutes or the equivalent to $2.50 for 12 months = $30 http://www.future-nine.com/
daddiesgirl I would be very suspicious of this service.. I can't see how with vonage possibly going to die and other voip's not doing that well including some people not predicting that packet8 will even have a long term future.. then yours may be another slew of providers that get your money and die.. SunRocket is one such example..
Funny thing about sunrocket customers they paid like $200 for a year or so.. got some free phones with it too as I recall.. but for that year they didn't always have working phone service let's say 75% of the time.. and eventually that company died and left all the customers with 0 phone service.. well then what happened? Another company took over for them after many days, weeks without phone service.. and what's going on with this company now.. dead or dying?
Here is 1 additional advantage to owning your own pap2 device.. if your provider dies let’s say future-nine dies.. you can take it to another provider within 10-20 minutes just by re-programming the settings yourself.. where as if you have a gizmo or a vonage locked adapter no such luck.. it’s actually possible having your own sip devices to have them using multiple voip providers not just one.. there are free services available but I suggest you read dslreports forums to know those..
ooma is a DEVICE and not a service. They have added services sure, but the box itself merges your phone line and latches on with the DSL, allowing you to make calls through your DSL line, which is required for the phone to work. If you don't have DSL, then yeah, you don't have a phone line, but who doesn't have DSL these days? Here's a quickie review from Metacafe. The review on the ooma box starts around 3:40. . .
I personally heard of it after seeing my brother in law using it and recommending it. He's using it for his home so he didn't get any service upgrades. I'm getting mine installed with multiple lines for my business and even with the upgraded plans and multiple lines, the service is still way cheaper than getting a 4-5 business line with AT&T's best package, which is about $20 per line per month.
Yup, well update the thread in 5 years with your tale of horrors.. I just smell a recipe for disaster.. accessing the backend voip networks is not free for call termination nor for renting DID's I know that much.. if you pay a fixed amount for unlimited service that company will die on you and leave you in the dust.. it's only happened many times already..
Last edited by themaster; 11-28-2008 at 10:26 AM..
I've had Vonage for several years and am pleased with their service. I can't see Call Centric being that much better of a deal.
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