VOIP anyone, need recomendations

I am looking for a inexpensive VoIP for my house, I have heard great and nightmare situations about magic jack, but not sure on any of the others.

I am looking for thoughts and can the beeb provide some insightful and helpful suggestions?

chris

 

Depends on what you're looking to have as a result? You really need a home phone to be a 'home phone' or do you have a cell you can use in place of?

I'm not massively experienced with voip but what we have done is for business purposes we have a 888 number that goes to a voip calling service that rings through to our cell phones, then we took our home phone and added/transfered to this service for $5 eliminating the copper land line cost entirely.

Magic Jack works, it is entirely dependent on your internet feed. When it works, it works. When there's a problem, as I understand it customer service is nearly non-existent.

FWIW...

 

This would be for a home phone, we have very stable Internet in our area. So I am not worried on that side of things. Just need a phone in the house for the 12 yr old to use. Wifie and I have cells we use for everything, but he doesn't.
Guess I will give magicjack a try

 

Any VoIP solution is only going to be a reliable your internet connection. Make sure that is good a dn reliable first before looking for VoIP solutions.

Packet8
Vonage
Ooma

All work just fine on a good connection. Hit the sites and collect information. Sometimes the devil is in the details..like Ooma for instance. On the surface it's a great deal..by the equipment and the basic service is essentially free. However once you start adding additional features onto the plan the cost rises quickly.

I've been a Vonage customer for a long time...it works well.

 

If that's the case take look a Ooma. Keep to the standard package and it should be essentially free after you buy the equipment.

 

Magicjack has worked awesome for me for about 3 years now.

 

We've used Vonage for over 5 years at our business running 2 lines. Very happy with the overall performance and love the voice mails going to email. The online admin functions are great, but to be honest, i never use them.

IN this area, Verizon is pretty much doing away with all copper connections. Even if you want a basic phone line, they'll come in at put a FiOS box in your house. So even if you want a cheap basic line from the phone company, it'll be VoIP.

I did have Verizon's VoIP for a few months at home. Quality was horrible and switched to vonage (at 1/3 the price). Quality was excellent, but never used it, so we got rid of it.

 

I've been using Vonage since 2003 and am very happy with it and the feature set. The low cost (1500 minute) plan isn't bad for the use you describe.

One of us who have Vonage can refer you, you get discounted or free terminal equipment, and whoever refers you gets a free month of service.

 

Check out voip.ms I've been using their service for 4 years now, very happy.

 

Been using Ooma for almost 2 years. It hasn't been 100% perfect, but it works quite well and consistently wins for its call clarity over other VoIP and phone company services.

 

Google Voice + Obihai 202, gives you 2 lines that ring with 1 # to give out. It works great for my business, $70 initial cost, $0 monthly. No issues. Voicemail's transcribed to email, text to/from iPhone App or Google Voice Website.

 

The challenge with all of these services (unless it's enterprise level) is their is no guaranteed QoS (Quality of Service) over the public internet. Most of them don't take up more than 80K or so per RTP stream but if you have a spotty connection or poor upload speeds, or you work on the internet while on the phone, you will have problems. The best luck I have seen has been with reliable cable providers with big honkin' bandwidth. If you have latency issues with your connection, that can be a problem too.

 

This is true. My wife can always tell if I'm uploading pictures when she calls home due to noticeable degradation in call clarity. I have uverse internet right now with a half meg upload speed but am upgrading to 1.5meg upload speed so that should improve things.

 

I use Skype. I'm surprised no one else has mentioned it yet.

 

Trying to figure out if I can port my existing land-line # to any of these options. MagicJack Plus discusses 'picking a phone #' & Ooma has a 'choose area code' comment.

Have to do something soon as I've been putting this off way too long, but goal is to keep same #. Had it for over 50 years...

 

RingCentral will
http://www.ringcentral.com/legal/policies/porting.html

 

12 y/o boy? Just get him a burner cell with 100 minutes, that'll last a while. Girl? You'll be needing unlimited minutes...

 

You can port your number to Vonage.

 

Just a heads up that your access to XMPP will be going away in the near future.

 

Hands down obi100. Go to amazon, type in obi. You can transfer any number to a prepaid cell phone, then port that number to google voice. Just got rid of my 50 dollar a month phone bill forever. Works great.