Why I don’t VOIP
Ever seen those commercials for MagicJack? You know, the ones where they’re offering you phone service for about $20.00 a year. I see them a lot, and I keep thinking about getting one, but I always end up deciding against it. However, seeing as they are so cheap, I thought it might be a good idea to explain why I’m writing on a site like this, and not taking advantage of something that seems so frugal.
I admit, these are my reasons, and they may not apply to everyone’s situation, but I think it’s worth going through my thought processes to see why sometimes what appears to be the most frugal alternative isn’t always the best one.
I should also mention that I haven’t actually used the product – but I don’t think that matters in this case because my reasons for not using it have nothing to do with the quality of service – and everything to do with the circumstances of our household.
Let’s start with a simple description of the device:
At base it looks like a fat USB key with a phone jack. In spirit it’s almost like a reverse modem. You plug the device into a spare USB slot on your Windows (XP or Vista) or Mac computer, and use its internet connection to access the telephone network. You can get a local number in many areas, and once it’s up and running you have a perfectly usable phone as long as you have an internet connection:
So, why didn’t we take advantage of it?
(Answers after the cut)
One reason is that I don’t like putting everything on one wire. Currently, we have two phone lines coming into the house – one for the main phone and our DSL connection, the other for the kids’ line. Given the reliability of our phone service, I wasn’t entirely thrilled with the idea of putting the kids’ phone onto the same wire as the house phone and our DSL. If we lost one we would lose everything, and that happens a bit more often than I really care to admit. So, that’s strike one.
Strike two has to do with how it works. Basically, you only have phone service while the computer it’s connected to is up and running with an internet connection.
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that; but it doesn’t work for us.
You see the only computer that we keep up and running all the time is my desktop – which runs Linux. MagicJack doesn’t support Linux, so we’d need to use it on one of the other computers. In principle that’s fine, we have two Windows desktops and a couple of laptops we could use: They’re older systems, but they could do the job.
The only catch is that they’re the teenagers’ systems, and we lock those down so they only have internet during certain hours of the day. We also shut them down at night. That would mean we’d either have to let a teenager who would rather spend time on the internet than breathe have 24/7 access to the web, or accept that we could only make 911 calls when the kids are allowed on the internet. I’m also not keen on the idea that we’d have to wait for Windows to boot before we could make a phone call in a late night emergency.
Ummmm, yeah, no.
Anyway, that’s a brief explanation of why we didn’t go with MagjcJack. It’s a perfectly useful product that doesn’t meet our needs – and there is nothing less frugal than buying something that doesn’t meet the need you bought it for. That, for me, was MagicJack.
It’s a great idea, and if you keep a Windows machine (or a Mac) connected to the internet and running 24/7 it’s probably a really good way to save money. If you don’t you probably won’t find it quite as useful.
What I would like, is if someone who does use it and reads this blog could give us a brief review in the comments. That way, people who are considering it will be able to get a bit of a heads up before they spend the money.
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