MagicJack Femtocell Gates Cell Traffic to VoIP 243
olsmeister writes "MagicJack is demonstrating a femtocell device at CES that will allow any GSM phone (locked or unlocked) to place free phone calls over the internet using VOIP. The device costs $40 and includes free service for 1 year. It supposedly will cover a 3,000 sq ft house."
Any asterisk compatable solutions? (Score:5, Interesting)
I would love to have something like this that interfaces with Asterisk.
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It can. There are GSM cards that work with Asterisk.
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The only asterisk/gsm related hardware I've ever found was for connecting asterisk to the gsm network (using cellular as a trunk) not connecting gsm phones to Asterisk.
Is this legal? (Score:5, Informative)
There's no "trick" to work with locked phones. GSM has no network-side authentication, so all you have to do is impersonate your carrier's network (this is trivial). But I can't imagine this being in line with regulations. Another issue is that encryption does not work unless you're a carrier and share a secret with the phone's SIM, which means that invariably your calls will be broadcast in the clear when you're using this device.
I'm not entirely sure this is a good idea. Femtocells are great, but impersonating carriers gets you into all sorts of sticky issues.
Re:Is this legal? (Score:5, Interesting)
Illegal as hell under FCC rules since this would would be an unlicensed device intentionally disrupting a licensed service. At least that's my reading, the device might as well be a DoS for legitimate users within the range of the device.
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Re:Is this legal? (Score:5, Funny)
For T-Mobile (I've had a G1 for a year), I'd argue that just plain wireless spectrums don't extend into the home.
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Who said anything about unlicensed? Whipping one up in your home workshop, sure, but OEMs obviously are perfectly capable of meeting any necessary licensing conditions.
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Spectrum licensing. Mobile carriers pay big bucks to license their spectrum.
AT&T's MicroCell [att.com] (which is a UMTS base station) includes a GPS receiver and requires a GPS signal in order to operate, because it transmits only on frequencies licensed to AT&T in the area the device is being used. (Mobile carriers in the USA do not have nationwide spectrum licenses, and the frequencies they are permitted to use vary throughout the country.)
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It's not a hardware license, it's a usage license -- cell carriers have exclusive licenses for the use of the spectrum.
Re:Is this legal? (Score:5, Interesting)
By your logic, those minijack-to-FM transmitters should also be illegal, but they're not. The FCC allows people to broadcast as long as they restrict it to a certain power level that won't interfere with others.
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This minijack-to-FM transmitters operate at a low enough power rating so as not qualify as a true FM transmitter. That's why you can't pick up their signal much more than 6-10 feet away.
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They also are illegal in many places.
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Illegal as hell under FCC rules since this would would be an unlicensed device intentionally disrupting a licensed service. At least that's my reading, the device might as well be a DoS for legitimate users within the range of the device.
That's what I was thinking. I wonder how long this product will last until AT&T or one of the other carriers takes the producer of this thing to court.
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I'd say buy it quick before it's gone, but given it hooks to a service there is really no point. There's a commentary on the viability of the service model that everyone seems to be running toward there.
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Only in designated spectrum. And even then you need to register with the FCC and have the device type accepted. Take a look at all devices that transmit anything and note the FCCID string that is on said device. Those fall under the Part 95 licensing.
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Not to mention that UMTS phones will prefer the UMTS signal even if a GSM signal is available. Also, it will stop working once GSM goes away and is fully replaced by UMTS (which does authenticate the network), if that does ever happen.
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Is this true with UMTS as well?
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No, but don't count on UMTS being free of issues either.
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Just make your house into a faraday cage ;)
Houses with builtin Faraday cages (Score:5, Informative)
One of the weird things I've run into in doing 3rd-party tech support is that houses can, indeed, have Faraday cages.
If the house is of the right vintage (mostly pre-1950's) it may have plaster walls. One method of hanging plaster is to put up a metal mesh lath [wikipedia.org] which can make a very effective Faraday cage out of each of the rooms.
A modern variation on the builtin Faraday cage is rigid foam insulation that is covered on one or both sides with a metal reflective coating, often used in external wall insulation.
When a new customer calls and says they are having trouble getting wireless to work in their house, one of my first questions is does it have plaster walls.
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Another issue is that encryption does not work unless you're a carrier and share a secret with the phone's SIM, which means that invariably your calls will be broadcast in the clear when you're using this device.
This is no different than most household wireless phones or blue-tooth headsets for cellphones.
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DECT phones (which are pretty popular in Europe, not so sure about the USA) do have encryption. I believe it's been broken, but at least they tried. Same with Bluetooth.
Does MagicJack Work? (Score:2)
Does the MJ actually work worth a darn? How is call quality?
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Works fine if you want to leave your Windows box on 24/7, plug another USB device into it, and install their ad-laden call manager software. Oh, and its great if you like non-existent tech support.
No free lunches, folks. Unlimited service for $19.95/year isn't possible unless that money is coming from ads, a ponzi scheme, or outright fraud.
Re:Does MagicJack Work? (Score:4, Informative)
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$20/year really isn't possible, because no matter how low their internal operating costs, they have to terminate calls on the PSTN, and they don't have equipment in every city to do that on their own network. Legally mandated termination fees for rural areas can be $0.04/minute (or sometimes even higher) -- at that rate you'd only be able to talk for 500 minutes before they'd be in debt.
My guess they're taking advantage of these same fees, and giving everyone inbound phone numbers in high-termination-fee lo
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As it is, my current cell phone uses my home WiFi to make calls when I am at home anyway, so I doubt this device would be much benefit to me personally.
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There's also another device: Nettalk TK6000 [tk6000.com], which looks quite a bit like MagicJack, but without the USB connector. It doesn't require a PC at all.
As for MagicJack, I have been using one at home for several months now. I have it running on a headless XP desktop, so the ad-laden call manager doesn't bother me since I never see it. Sometimes the call quality isn't that great, especially when I first got it, but after some tweaks, it's working rather well.
I wouldn't say MagicJack tech support is non-existe
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This looks like a standard ATA, bundled with a VoIP provider. These are fairly common.
The clever bit with the MagicJack is using GSM rather than wired phones. Though it requires a computer running Windows and the article dosn't address issues like using more than one handset at once.
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Yes. I have been on it for 1 year. I have a TK6000 now as well with the intention of moving over to that over the next year.
MagicJack's software or device seems to have issues over long periods of time that require the device get unplugged (reboot) along with the software restarting or the quality becomes unusable. This may be a mac issue. It is basically a standard audio i/o device and therefore switching users causes the user-based app to lose the audio for the phone; but maintains a network connection
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Yeah it works. Call quality isn't as good as a landline, but I had a better time using MJ than Skype.
You newbs, MJ is not a scam... (Score:2, Informative)
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I don't get it....
My T-Mobile contract gives me virtually unlimited calling in the US, and with my VOIP carrier I can call anywhere in the world for 0.01 Euro/min.
I've spent hours on the phone to Europe and Japan and have yet to recharge my original 10 Euro purchase.
And I'm not thethered to the house, I don't have another gadget to deal with, and it works anywhere I get a cell signal.
What problem is this gadget trying to solve?
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But I guess that's my point. I would think that the number of people who have a cell phone with no contract, but have broadband and a computer on 24/7, is vanishingly small.
If you have a cell phone, then you typically have a contract. If you have the resources for a broadband connection, then you have the resources for a mobile phone contract.
So are they thinking that people will use this at home while maintaining their cell phone contract? In any case, I don't see a big market for this.
It's a neat idea,
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If you have a cell phone, then you typically have a contract. If you have the resources for a broadband connection, then you have the resources for a mobile phone contract.
This is where the error is. It USED to be the case that everyone with a cell was under contract, but since the introduction of pay-as-you-go (prepaid) cell phones, you can buy minutes and hold them forever. This device allows you to save those minutes for when you are away from the home, while otherwise using the same phone at home for
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I'm sure this will eventually adapt to the new wireless paradigm eventually but for some services I have they REQUIRE a landline (home phone) before they will let you sign up for service. I would have to go back and look to remember which services in particular but I think my natural gas provider had this requirement. It's probably not as much an issue for apartment/condo dwellers since the landlord would handle those contracts.
Many have them to ensure 911 service knows how to find you. An address on file w
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I've also run into one provider that sends back a password via SMS. So I guess in this brave new world you need both... At least until the last trumpet of the dinosaurs dies down.
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The majority of people will find something like this useful as they spend most of their time either at home or in the office. It combines the beauty of having your cellphone available anywhere, yet making 95% of your calls free. However it won't take off as the cellphone providers will just bundle enough minutes to not make it worth it. Here in the UK you can pay £30/month for unlimited calls and sms. More expensive but less hassle.
Phillip.
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The desktop client is a little clunky, it's just a dialer. Something like visual voicemail would be sweet. It's a little slow to start up like it's downloading updates or something. I'd love be able to upload an audio file as my outgoing message (any suggestions anyone?)
I had some echos the first week I was us
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Yes it sucks at times when I'm downloading etc, then the quality suffers a little
That's not magic jack's fault. Look into setting up traffic shaping. It slows down your web surfing a little while you're talking, but it's nowhere near as noticeable as a loss of audio quality.
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The real problem with MagicJack is that their business model is not sustainable. ie. it's too cheap for what they offer. Currently they are burning money like crazy.
Eventually something is going to change. They're either going to have to change the pricing, seriously degrade their service (eg. too large of a customer base), or close their doors. The turnover of VOIP providers is insane, most go out of business. Establishing a phone number and then losing it or having to find a new provider because the
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That being said, why does anyone still want a land line?
A) Some people don't get Cell Reception (or it costs more than the land line)
B) A few of us live in places where the cell phones have gone down after mother nature had a fit, but the land lines were still working perfectly.
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You made me think of something...
If I was ATT or Verizon or T-Mobil I would want everyone to own one of these things.
The reason being is that on my cell phone (I have the unlimited plan so I gave up ye olde land line years ago) 90% of my calls are made from home. I suspect my usage probably mirrors a lot of other users. (maybe a different pattern for teens running to friends all the time and what not but they like texting anyway so thats almost no bandwidth used)
They would save huge amounts of wireless band
Requires PC (Score:4, Informative)
The current MagicJack is a device about the size of a matchbox with a USB connection and a phone jack. The USB connector plugs into the user's computer, loads software onto it, and uses the computer's power, processor and broadband connection. The femtocell will also use the PC, but it will let users make calls with their cell phones instead of wired phones.
Why can't they make a standalone device!?
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That is exactly what is holding me back. How hard would this be?
To implement a software radio? (Score:2)
Hundreds of dollars hard. Maybe $100 when mass-produced.
Besides which, if it was standalone then they'd lose their advertising revenue. For me, the ads in software on my machine are a complete turnoff. For that, I've never installed it.
Read the TOS for MJ its bad! (Score:2)
The TOS for MJ is one of the worst I have ever seen; they could write malware and get protected by the TOS you must agree to. Most people don't read it... At 1st I wondered if they were going 2 make their money by spying on me. (lotta luck I did all I could to sandbox it and later ran it in a VM... now I moved to a TK6000)
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Damn near anyone on this website should be able to make their own Magic Jack "standalone" out of spare parts in the closet.
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Wish I had some points to mod this up. Well said
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No need for a computer on 24/7 - plus you could automatically prioritize the VOIP traffic from the USB port to guarantee call quality.
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lack of linux support on MagicJacks part
Re:Requires PC (Score:5, Interesting)
This post will mention specific products and services, but of which I am a customer and the following is my testimony.
For my home phone:
I signed up with CallCentric for free.
I bought a Linksys PAP2 for $50 before shipping. (This is the VIOP box which allows me to keep my standard phone/message machine)
I set it up with CallCentric and tested the service with CallCentric-assigned ph#.
For $20 I ported my phone# over to CallCentric.
For $3.95 a month, I get calling and $0.015 (1.5cents) per minute calling to US and Canada. The fee is a 911-recovery fee and some other fee.
My phone bill is less than $5 a month.
There is no PC required, just the PAP2 and the broadband connection. I even get callerID!
This is my monthly bill:
This email is a receipt of your transaction.
Product name Period Price
DID - Pay Per Minute - 14106661533 Jan 01, 2010 - Jan 31, 2010 $ 1.95
911 Cost Recovery Fee $ 1.50
Billed from Credit card: $ 0.00
Billed from Balance: $ 3.45
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Besides the ad's, using a PC means they can reduce the complexity/cost of the femotcell device. Making it dumber and offloading work to the PC means fewer components and cheaper to fab.
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It does? It shows the ad for their additional dialing features (like international) next to the onscreen dial pad, but I think that is all. There are no pop-up ads for anything for third parties. You can even install some third-party addons that stop that thing from popping up when you start dialing.
Too many possible holes (Score:4, Interesting)
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1. That it will not use GSM encryption
2. That it is not encrypting the voip data
3. That someone using a cellphone in their home NEEDS encryption to the femtocell
3a. Not being able to make calls is preferable to being able to make unencrypted calls.
4. Intercepting unencrypted GSM can be performed "with ease"
5. The people doing the interception don't have a backdoor to the GSM network
These all seem to me to be pretty poor assumptions.
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You think people care about the privacy? If they do then why are services likes Google's so popular?
Requiem for UMA (Score:5, Interesting)
You know, T-Mobile, a few years back, introduced UMA (Unlicensed Mobile Access) [wikipedia.org] with some of their phones (which T-Mo has subsequently marketted under 3 different names, you know, to confuse their customers, I guess), but none of the other carriers picked up on it, and T-Mo pretty quickly abandoned it - I believe their network still supports it, and some/all of their Blackberries support it, but they pretty quickly stopped advertising it, none of the Android phones support it, and T-Mo has quietly gotten rid of every non-Blackberry phone that used to have the UMA feature.
It's really kind of a shame - UMA is a great idea: basically, any WiFi hotspot that you can connect to become a "cell tower" (well, it routes cell phone traffic over a tunnel on the Internet, to T-Mo's network, so it basically becomes VoIP). This Femtocell idea is something that some of the other carriers are sort of testing (I have some relatives on Sprint who got one because there is very poor reception at their house). But, I think UMA is a superior solution to these femtocells, because a) with UMA, you need a phone with UMA support, but you had to get a phone anyway, so adding UMA to phones would have been almost 'free' from the customer perspective, with the only other equipment needed being something you *probably* already have, and if you don't, you can get dirt cheap at Microcenter, Best Buy, Fry's, etc., and B) the femtocell will *only* work at your own location where you put it, whereas UMA would work with any Internet connection and most Wifi hotspots, which means that I could take advantage of it at other locations if they have WiFi (relatives or friends houses, school, work, shopping, etc) too.
Now, I think with the Android phones, you can now do some VoIP calling, but the advantage with UMA was that calls would seamlessly transfer between wifi and the cell network (if you left Wifi range, or entered Wifi range). It's really a damn shame that the cell phone industry didn't adopt UMA as a feature, because to me, it seems like a vastly superior approach than femtocells.
I suppose it's theoretically possible that UMA could rise from the ashes, but at this point, it seems kinda dead. More's the pity.
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This isn't ideal: wifi uses more power than GSM or 3G.
It is being marketed by carriers: AT&T markets it as 3G Micro [att.com]
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Well, yes, it won't work at *every single possible* Wifi hotspot, but it will work at most. As for the power issue, if I'm at a location where my cell access sucks, I'm willing to make that tradeoff. My point is, that UMA phones will benefit at lots of locations, potentially, whereas femtocells only benefit you at a fixed location. Most people and businesses don't have femtocells installed, but a great many (at least in the U.S.) do have Wifi.
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This isn't ideal: wifi uses more power than GSM or 3G.
It's wonderfully idea if, like a lot of people, you don't get great T-Mobile service inside your home (their share of the spectrum doesn't penetrate well or something). It's a wonderful tradeoff, and the reason why I went with T-Mobile when I had the chance.
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This isn't ideal: wifi uses more power than GSM or 3G.
Not true. A poor 3G connection can use considerably more power than your typical WIFI.
seems decent (Score:3, Informative)
Some interference occurred when the tester tried talking while downloading a large file or playing an online game. If you can live with that, we think the Magic Jack is a great deal.
Something that could easily be overcome with a router that has decent QoS capabilities. Overall, it seems like a decent deal.
No QoS (Score:2)
You can't QoS the magicjack. it uses a HUGE range of ports making the QoS only useful if you don't do something else in that wide UDP range they use. It only initiates with a predictable port the proxy gets it going in some random range after that. Unless you have a fancy router that can figure it out somehow (by destination) you basically are taking the upper range of UDP to a higher priority. The software doesn't let you pick the connection; otherwise you could stick it on a second network port and handl
I have that magicjac doodad... (Score:5, Funny)
and now I can call all my friends for free.
And then I realized, I have no friends.
FOR SALE MAGIC JACK, used twice. $1
Frankly, I don't give a damn about magicjack, (Score:5, Interesting)
Reverse engineering the sucker, and getting a Free driver built would be a hell of a boon to small scale asterisk setups and similar. Most devices running asterisk or other software PBXs have at least one USB port, and being able to set up your own asterisk integrated femtocell would be awesome(either to let you take advantage of a lower priced/fewer minutes plan by doing all your home calling over a cheap SIP trunk or simply to take advantage of the fact that used and/or low-end GSM handsets are substantially cheaper than decent Wi Fi based SIP handsets are).
I don't assume that they would approve(and I can't imagine that team traditional telco would be too happy either) but if MagicJack is actually planning to make femtocells as cheap as USB wifi dongles, they get a gold star from me.
Why femto? (Score:4, Informative)
Why is this called a femto cell? The area covered is much more than 10^-15 of that of a standard cell tower. If this device covers a radius of 50 ft, and a tower works to a radius of about mile, then the fractional area covered is 10^-4, or somewhere between a microcell and a millicell.
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Pretty sure femto refers to the radius in light years. At least, that's how I would defend it, if I had to.
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Pretty sure femto refers to the radius in light years. At least, that's how I would defend it, if I had to.
Yep, 50 feet = 1.611*10^-15 lightyears = 1.611 femtolightyears [wolframalpha.com]!
Re:Why femto? (Score:5, Informative)
The names are not meant in the traditional mathematical sense; they just refer to coverage. A microcell will cover roughly a hotel, a picocell a typical office floor.
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Dandy (Score:2)
What's the point? (Score:2)
I can just as easily make a call over WLAN. And most, if not all smartphones do WLAN already. Just install the software, if your phone doesn’t already have it build-in (as mine does).
The title is why I dislike English (Score:4, Insightful)
Mod me off-topic if you need to, but this title is why I my relationship with the English language is still slightly iffy.
MagicJack Femtocell Gates Cell Traffic to VoIP
So let's see, proper noun, noun, noun, noun, preposition, noun. Where's the verb? Who's trafficking cells through the gates here? Or wait, the cell traffic of the femtocell gates is to ... no, wait. With all the noun-as-adjective and ambiguous noun-or-verb words, your natural parser screws up---assuming your natural parser (like mine) is greedy and wants to impose structure as early and often as possible.
Would it really be that awful to say "MagicJack femtocell gating cell traffic to voip"? Then you need a smaller token (i.e. word) lookahead before you can reduce "MagicJack femtocell" into subject, "gating" into verb, "cell traffic" to object, etc. (or at least, you will sooner make guesses which later turn out to be correct, and so you won't have to backtrack).
I ar dum. Editor buffalo smurf easier to marklar and understand. Plies.
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http://www.google.com/search?q=MagicJack++consumer+report+scam&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a [google.com]
Seems like there is a lot of comments in the blogosphere against Magic Jack. I hardly had time to see if it is a campaign against Magic Jack or it is a legid.
Anybody?
Re:MJ is a SCAM folks (Score:5, Informative)
I have one.
The software/drivers are in no way reliable enough to make it a serious replacement for a "real" phone, but as a backup when you want to make free calls around North America, it's not a bad solution. The call quality is perfectly fine. It's worth the $20/year they charge, but not a whole lot more. If they could get their software (and their abominable, laughable, seizure-inducing support) to work a little more smoothly, I'd be more willing to consider additional products from the company.
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The ability to ditch your wireless phone and use your existing mobile phone (provided it has GSM) as well as use the service without dedicating a computer to the task. Basically, when you walk in the house and walk past the femtocell your mobile phone re-syncs to the femtocelll and now you are no longer using your wireless carrier but Magic Jack for service. When you leave the house your phone reconnects to your mobile carrier. Why do you need this? You may not but there is still a large enough constituency
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This product appears to be different from the late night "Magic Jack!" product you're referring to. This is a femtocell "mini-tower" that allows cell phones to connect to the VOIP provider on the other end of the magic jack tower - so you wouldn't be limited to land lines with this new product.
Re:MJ is a SCAM folks (Score:5, Informative)
Is it really that much better and more convenient than WiFi? When I am in my house, I press the Internet calling icon on my phone and it connects to my VoIP provider's server via SIP.
For starters it will work for ANY GSM phone. It doesn't matter if it has WiFi or not. Second, it's cheaper than your VOIP provider unless your VOIP provider can beat $1.70 mo.
I have been using T-Mobile's @Home service for the past year ($10 month as a third line) and it's been extremely reliable. I didn't like Magic Jack because I needed a computer and their software on it to have phone service at home. If this thing works as advertised I just may pull the trigger.
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Not every phone has WiFi.
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not every phone with wifi can do uma or any other "call over wifi" equivalent either. Mostly blackberries, I think? I don't see a lot of alternatives for gsm phones.
Re:MJ is a SCAM folks (Score:4, Informative)
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I've got an Ooma system. 3000 free local or long distance minutes a month, no monthly charge. The call quality isn't perfect, but I'm saving $300 a year after it pays for itself in 8 months (2 months from now), and I'm not going to complain.
Re:MJ is a SCAM folks (Score:5, Informative)
Consumer Reports likes it.
http://consumerist.com/2010/01/consumer-reports-science-shows-magic-jack-is-actually-worthwhile.html [consumerist.com]
Re:MJ is a SCAM folks (Score:5, Informative)
Re:MJ is a SCAM folks (Score:5, Informative)
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You mean the GSM one that MagicJack JUST UNVEILED PUBLICLY A FEW HOURS AGO? Whatever happened to critical thinking?!?
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It's not even out yet.
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Not quite.
The device is $150. IF you sign up for an unlimited minutes plan, they will give you a $100 mail-in rebate. The plan's pricing depends on which test market you are in, and whether or not you have AT&T DSL or U-Verse service. But in any event, an unlimited minutes plan is optional. You can just buy the box for $150 and use your plans minutes as normal. The purpose the box serves under those circumstances is merely improving your coverage.
Might be able to negotiate (Score:2)
Lot's of people figure you can't negotiate with a cell or cable company, but that might not be true. I have relatives who use Sprint. They've been using Sprint for a few years, and had upgraded to a more premium voice & data package for 2 phones. They were generally happy with Sprint, but the coverage at their house was crappy. They talked to Sprint about this, basically told them they weren't going to pay additional monthly fees on top of the premium package fees they were already paying, but were unha