Lower Your Phone Bill

I have talked in the past about lowering your phone bill by switching to VOIP. I am a big proponent of the technology and the cost savings is amazing especially if you make a lot of long distance calls. There is a new player in the VOIP market and while not perfect magicJack is making waves with its low price of $20 per year.

I was skeptical of how well the magicJack would work. I have known about the device for about three months, but have not wanted to endorse it until I got more information. Well, my brother purchased one about two months ago and has had no problems. I have talked to him on it a few times and it is not quite as clear as traditional VOIP but the difference is negligible. Your initial cost is $40. Twenty for the device and twenty for the first year of service. There are no long distance fees to anywhere in the US and Canada and there is no limit to the number of minutes you can use.

Setup for the magicJack is really easy. It is a USB device that plugs into any computer built in the last 5 years and the drivers (a little program that tells the computer how to communicate with a device) are loaded automatically. From there you just plug a phone in and it just runs like a normal telephone line. Pretty simple.

I do have some apprehensions about making this your primary telephone. It does not support e911, and thus, in an emergency is pretty much useless. I am also not completely fond of people using anything that has to connect to their computer to make phone calls. The reason being, so many people do not know how to properly care for their computer over long periods of time. So as the computer slows down, I expect the magicJack service to not work as well on that computer. This of course is not the companies fault.  I help run a small cable company and I see (on a daily basis) how badly people beat up their computers so I want to make this clear before recommending a product that is dependent on a potentially unstable device.

Overall this is a great product.  I recommend it specifically for people who travel all the time and cannot afford to run up their cell phone minutes, especially world travelers.  My brother used this while he was in Egypt.  It worked great plugged into a laptop at a wireless internet hot spot.  As far as alternatives for your home phone I am working on a detailed list of recommended VOIP providers that provide e911 service and will be releasing it in about two weeks.