magicJack and MagicJack Plus Support, Reviews, FAQs and Hacks

zanzzz

I have had Magicjack for over a year and Vonage prior to that. I ran a number of head to head tests of the the two VOIP systems. Both were run on the same PC which were situated behind two routers, a switch, and a cable modem. The cable speed was rated 6mb down, 1 mb up.
Both worked near flawlessly when there was no concurrent upload bandwidth use. I then added uploads of increasing bandwidth size until maximized capacity was reached while a VOIP call was in progress. The differences were night and day! Vonage does not play well with others, it started dropping out with only a minor concurrent upload. Magicjack was not bothered until virtually all the upload bandwidth was taken by the other application!
Vonage costs as much in a month as Magicjack for a year and runs like shit when you upload anything else at the same time! Vonage wants to be installed ahead of all routers so it can maintain its QOS but it tends to crash out there and skips just the same when competing with other uploads regardless of its position.
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There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.
FZ

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stroths · Posted: Sun Mar 01, 2009 1:40 pm Post subject:

My wife's office line is Vonage and I run it behind my router. I have QOS through my router and Vonage has no issues even when I am stressing my upstream. Same goes for my MJ.

It's all in the QOS implementation.
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Kif Kroker · Posted: Sun Mar 01, 2009 2:38 pm Post subject:

I have Vonage with the ATA built into the router and have never noticed any problems when network was under heavy usage. MJ has worked pretty reliably as well in these situations.

zanzzz · Posted: Tue Mar 03, 2009 4:02 pm Post subject: QOS behind a router

It's nice to hear that someone has configured their router to prioritize VOIP packets to avoid the dropout problem cause by an upload bottleneck. I doubt that many people are able to overcome this problem with their existing hardware. Most of the time if I encounter dropout in a call and the other party has a VOIP phone I ask if they have someone using P2P file sharing on their network and almost invertably the answer is yes. The problem seems fairly widespread and suggestions as to which routers and how to configure them to minimize this problem would be greatly appreciated!
_________________
There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.
FZ

az2008 · Posted: Tue Mar 03, 2009 4:09 pm Post subject: Re: QOS behind a router

milkchaser · MagicJack Newbie Joined: 20 Apr 2009 Posts: 1

I tried without success to get MJ to initialize on my system. Tech support guy told me that MJ and Vonage cannot coexist and that I would have to unplug Vonage. That was a deal-breaker.

But this thread seems to imply that the two can co-exist on the same network? Is this so? If so, what is causing the initialization problem? My system (XP) would not recognize the MJ drive at all.

hsweiss · Posted: Tue Apr 21, 2009 11:03 am Post subject: Re: MJ & Vonage together?

Matt9876 · Posted: Tue May 12, 2009 1:35 pm Post subject:

Vonage worked voice mail light MJ doesn't.
Vonage supported seven digit dialing for local numbers,MJ 10 digit only.
Vonage gives name and number on caller ID,MJ gives number only.
Vonage offers more calling features than MJ.

MJ cost much less and the call quality is comparable so I'm staying with MagicJack. Smile

rrcole · MagicJack Newbie Joined: 31 Dec 2009 Posts: 6

I had vonage for 24 HRS. It worked great but the customer service was brutal. I was not getting locked into a 2 year deal with customer service like that. To damn expensive compared to MJ. I got MJ for a gift and worth every penny for the yearly fee.