Can you drop your home or office phone line for one that only costs 20 dollars a year? You might be surprised. Read on for our hands on review.

As high tech as our house is we still keep a POTS line (plain old telephone system) line around. Mainly it is to send faxes, yes even with the advent of email, and internet faxing applications it's still easier to drop some paper in a machine, type in a number and hit the start button than to scan in a multi document PDF, go to a web page, upload the PDF, and check my email to make sure the internet fax went through. Also it's nice to have a backup number that people can call if my cell phone is not around me, or I don't hear it.

It seemed like a good deal even if the service wasn't that great, so we decided to check it out even though it did get some very negative reviews on the internet. The cost was 40 dollars; 20 dollars for a 1 year subscription, and 20 dollars for the USB phone adapter. Five days later it came in.

After working with it for a day the verdict is that it is not 100 percent perfect, but it's more than good enough for our phone usage, and it allows us to drop the land line which costs around $27 for the line and long distance per month after taxes, and spend 20 dollars a YEAR on the magic jack. After the first year this equates to a savings of $307 a year. Also It includes a voice mail system that will email voice mails the email account it is registered with, call waiting, and caller ID which were not included in the $27 from the POTS provider.

After a determination was made that the service would be satisfactory it was time to see if it would replace all phones in the house.

A quick trip to the demarc (point the phone company ties their lines to the home) and the home was severed from the telco.

Next a quick plug in from the magic jack to a splitter in the garage using an old line splitter, and dial tone flooded the fax machine, kitchen phone, and garage phone. No I would never wire anything like this in a customers house. It's a temporary thing to see if it worked :).

It worked without any major glitches.

MAGIC JACK RUNDOWN:
PROS:

• It's 20 bucks a year.
• Unlimited Long distance.
• It's 20 bucks a year.
• Call Waiting
• It's 20 bucks a year.
• Voicemail
• It's 20 bucks a year.
• Voicemails are emailed to you.
• It's 20 bucks a year.
• Caller ID.
• It's 20 bucks a year.
• If you have a headset you can take it with you and make calls from your laptop via any high speed internet connection that allows you to connect via that port.

CONS:

• The largest con that I had, and that many people have is that every time you pick up the phone the magic jack application pops up on your computer. I have it installed on our media PC, so if someone is watching a movie off of it, or watching something on www.hulu.com magic jack steals focus, and you have to minimize it again. I'm working on beating this, but so far haven't been 100 percent successful. I can make it so magic jack only steals focus for a split second and then minimizes again, but It will still drop you out of a full screen movie, or a full screen game on an incoming call, or if someone picks up a phone. I didn't want to use an old beater laptop just for magic jack, it seems like a waste of power since the media PC is always on anyways. It's not a deal breaker, but it's annoying.
• Every once in a while it will drop an outgoing call, forcing a redial. As of now it seems like it drops less than the Amarillo sprint cell phone service. That's not saying much.
• When answering a call there is a retraining sound (modem squeal) for 1 second before the line clears to talk to the person that called you.
• You might not get a number that is local to where people will call from. In this case the closest prefix to Amarillo was in Plainview TX which is 60 miles south. I'm not sure if that is long distance to Amarillo TX or not. A friend said he didn't think it was, but I haven't investigated it fully yet. I'm mainly using it for outbound faxes, so it doesn't matter too much here.
• The PC you install the magic jack on has to be on and on the internet. I have a media player/server/file server for my house, so I installed it on that system which is always on if the power is on.
• If the power goes out you won't be able to make a call on it unless everything you have is on battery backup from your internet router, to your pc, to your phone.

• You may not be able to get 911 service. In Amarillo TX you are not able to.
• You have to dial EVERY number with the area code, prefix, and suffix.
• Customer service is internet chat based only.
• You should have some basic grasp of computers, and phones to order it. Or hire us to install it for you.