On Tuesday, October 27, 2015 at 8:07:52 PM UTC-4, Harry Butz wrote:
On 10/27/2015 07:25 PM, Eagle wrote:
Do you have a voip service? What does it cost you monthly? Are local
calls free? Long distance state to state?
I am thinking about dropping phone service and going with voip.
Your opinion?

I'm rather fond of ooma.com as are millions of other consumer reports
subscribers.

+1

I tried MajicJack and Nettalk and wouldn't touch either with a 10 ft
poll. Fortunately MJ I was able to return to RadioShack. Nettalk
I had for a year. Serious problems with both in terms of support.
Neither have a voice phone support number, relying on emails and/or
chat windows. I found MJ support via chat available, but totally
incompetent. Nettalk, chat line is all backed up, they push you off
to open a trouble ticket online, then they never respond to it. Check out
Amazon for ratings there by customers and you'll see NT really, really
sucks. Among the problems with NT, while for a month or two it was
fine, it then started going into red light mode at least once a week.
Until I cycled the power, it was out of service.

So, 6 months ago I switched to Ooma. Very satisfied. It's been
reliable and they have real phone support that answers when you call.
I had no trouble getting a real person on the line and the person
sounded like they were US based. With NT ad MJ, IDK where they were,
but the chat was in broken English. Ooma service is "free", but you
have to pay for the device up front and monthly taxes and fees. The
taxes/fees run me $3.75 a month. The box they were selling for $120,
but they have sales where it's been $100, probably will again for the
holiday season. You can also buy new or used ones on Ebay. The service
includes unlimited US/Canada, unlimited Ooma to Ooma anywhere. They
have international calling by the minute. And they have a smartphone
app that lets you make or receive calls from your home # on your
smartphone via wifi. I found the smartphone app voice quality and
reliability to be far superior to the similar apps that MJ and NT
offer. If you make a lot of calls, beware the other
players. All of them claim to have "unlimited" residential usage,
but they all really cap you at some number of monthly minutes and
don't tell you about that except in fine print in the contract. With
Ooma it's 5000 mins, something I'd never hit. I did manage to hit
the NT limit of 1500 mins one month and then they just cut you off
with no warning, service goes dead. When I signed up for a year, the
limit was 3000 mins and they changed it a few months later, with no
notice. Also, while the NT/MJ types offer
discounts if you sign up for 3 yrs or whatever of service, I'd never
do that or at least not until you're really sure it works for you
after at least a year.
Ooma also offers a premier service, for $10 a month that includes
a lot of features like conferencing, call forwarding, etc, if any of
that is something you need.

Another issue is porting numbers. All of the above ones charge $20
to $40 to port your old number in if you want to. Otherwise you
can pick a new number, in some cases you can get a very local one,
in others it may be another town in the state. How much that matters,
depends on you. Also, I think MJ was playing a game where they
charge you to port your number out if you want to leave and take it.
From what I saw, it's questionable if that is even legal.

But I would look at Amazon at reviews on whatever you are considering.
Wish I had thought of that before I started.