atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums VOIP Phones & IP PBX VoIP & Cloud Phones, Hosted PBX, General IP Phones Magic Jack a Piece of Krap

Its always worked well for me. My offiece when I needed it, hotels when traveling, my daughters house.

My biggest problem with MJ is its annoying when it keeps popping up every few minutes. The only way I have been able to stop it is unplug the MJ.

I found that if I touched the mj or the usb cable, it would reboot. If I stayed away from it, I didn't have the problem.

Mine is 2 days old and works with no problem.

First out of wireless laptop to 2500 set.

Then I moved it to desktop with 2500,then to Partner and also fine.

I ordered one online and my Comcrap broadband in Michigan seemed insufficient to sustain a usable QoS for VoIP... my voice popped as though I was experiencing a 10% packet loss (a 1/10 second pop of silence at 1 second intervals). I returned it (they don't make that intuitively obvious, but I got there!).

Upon arriving in Florida, I found they were now selling them at Radio Shack and I tried again. My Comcrap in Florida apparently has better bandwidth and it works fine (almost). The voice quality is very good although my recorded voicemail name and greeting are a little spotty, but I make and receive calls pretty seamlessly and no one has complained of my calls.

HOWEVER, the critical problem I ran into today (Day 12 of my 30 day Money Back period) is that I called into an AT&T Conference Calling System where I must enter touch-tone digits for an "ID" and a "Passcode" to enter the conference call meetings that I must attend for work. For unknown reasons, that system would not correctly recognize the touch-tone digits as I entered them... and I couldn't get into my meeting! (Had to use my limited minutes on my cell phone to get in!).

For OTHER systems that require entry of touch-tone digits, it seems to work fine (i.e. MagicJack voicemail, other voicemail systems, a couple of ARU's I've had to call, etc.), however, the main reason I have the MagicJack is for these conference calls, so unless I can figure out how to resolve this, it is unusable for my purposes.

In my rudimentary troubleshooting, I tried two different handsets.. one of which is an old Slimline Touch-Tone phone that will sustain the touch-tone signal for as long as the button remains pressed. Neither worked. I tried pressing the buttons slowly, with long intervals between digits... that didn't work. I DID get "lucky" once and got my "ID" to be recognized, but I couldn't get the "Passcode" to be recognized to enter my meeting. I also tried all the different USB ports on my computer... no change.

I did try the MagicJack site and even had a "Live Tech" in chat with me. The first Tech I had, "Harry", quickly passed off my highly detailed question to "Level 2". After a few minutes, I had "Lewis" in chat and he asked a couple of questions before providing their final official feedback, which was "I apologize, the magicJack will not work with AT&T conference calling system."

I'm about to go to their site and "Apply the Latest Fixes", but I don't really expect that to make any difference either. If I can't get this fixed, I'll be returning this one too (but directly to Radio Shack... MUCH easier!) and will be setting up my old Vonage system.

Does anyone here have any ideas? Anyone... anyone?????

EDIT: Update - I just thought of another issue. While talking to my wife, I was disconnected at exactly (and mysteriously) 1 hour, zero minutes, and 1 second. Does this thing have a built in timer to disconnect after an hour or something. That will also kill me on conference calls (although, not so much with the wife).

EDIT: Update #2 - I suppose I should mention that I'm running 64bit MS Vista on my HP Pavilion. The presence of that OS, I'm sure, does not help my odds of success with the product. In breaking news.. I just tried it on my WinXP SP2 Dell machine. No change.

Does anyone here have any ideas? Anyone... anyone?????

Well Cheapskate, true to your name you get what you pay for.

-Hal

Thank you - Very helpful. But truthfully, I expect to get way more than I pay for. That's the allure of this product. Anyone have any constructive comments?

I don't think it's going to work for you Jack. I have found several apps that it won't work on, I couldn't get it to hear the digits dialed by my voicemail system to notify me of a message, I could monitor the line and hear the tons, but could not break dial tone on the magic jack. That said it works well about 90% of the time for general long distance voice calls, when it doesn't I hang up and dial again and it usually works fine. I have found that it eats up a lot of memory so I use it on an old laptop in the basement and feed the line into my phone system so it doesn't slow down my desktop.
Hal is right though, you are lucky when you get what you pay for, and with the low price of this thing, I'd say you get more. It just doesn't do something you and I would like it to do.

It is what it is. A cheap toy that will deliver voice most of the time in measured doses. It isn't designed to be much more than that. Forget the DTMF signaling through auto attendants/voice mails.

I have run across the same problems with the ATT conference calls. I was able to get it to work if actually used my mouse to press the buttons on the computer screen and did not use the phone.

I worked for me a while ago, I am not sure it still will, but hey, it is worth a try.

I would love to know if it still works.

jknuts1