Community Forums

Dmiles · 04-28-2011, 08:44 PM

Ours works well, it's cheap and my wife sent one to here family in the Philippines, and now they have a US phone number pretty neat.

But, as has been stated, you do need a good broadband connection for it to work well.

nalcon · 04-28-2011, 09:13 PM

I have MJ and it works like advertised. The only downside for me is long distance for local residences. My number is for a city 100 miles away. MJ states new numbers are coming but none yet. I use it for outgoing long distance.

JimM68 · 04-28-2011, 09:27 PM

My canadian buddy had a magic jack. It worked pretrty well. He had a USA number, and either of us could call the other for free. I thought it was an ideal solution, but he being canadian was too cheap to buy another after it died when it was 3 years old.

Pogo · 05-01-2011, 03:13 PM

We have had MJ for a couple of years at home. It works very well about 97% of the time. But, once in a while, the connection is not great. I guess it depends on the internet service. The computer has to be left on all the time. I wonder how much the electric costs to do that.

phxmtngirl · 05-04-2011, 11:07 AM

One thing with MJ is that you HAVE to have electricity to use it. Power goes out, you can't even call the power company to tell them, so you would still need a cell or a hard line phone.

Monacoach · 05-04-2011, 12:29 PM

Quote:

One thing with MJ is that you HAVE to have electricity to use it. Power goes out, you can't even call the power company to tell them, so you would still need a cell or a hard line phone.

I used magic jack with my laptop and of course it has a battery so I did not have to worry about losing power.

WheelingIt · 05-04-2011, 12:39 PM

OK, I'm going to be a bit of a naysayer and bring up the other side of the coin. We bought the MJ one year ago planning to use it on the road and have found it practically useless. From my point of view it's only handy if:

a) you have a good, strong connection
and
b) you are able to leave your computer on all the time

We often have neither. We do alot of dry-camping and it simply doesn't work for us to keep the computer on all the time (so, using it to recieve incoming calls is useless). Also, our WiFi varies a bit in strength. The strength really needs to be GOOD...we tried it several times on park WiFi (in the West) and it was close to unusable. On our aircard the strength again depends (and loads our computer usage...using both 3G and the MJ is often too choppy).

So for us, MJ was a total no-go.

JSPERRELLA · 05-04-2011, 02:47 PM

We use MJ at home and it works well. But did find that at least one phone exchange you can not call as it is not in their service area. I believe it was a US government park service. You can forward your MJ calls to email or your cellphone even if it is not hooked up.

Roam America · 05-06-2011, 08:17 PM

I've been using MJ for about 1.5 years. It is not so much the signal strength as much as it is the speed that is needed. MJ says you need at least 200K upload speed for it to work. At 200K, I find it to be very choppy. At 400K or better it works pretty well. On thing to do is right click on the COMPUTER ICON then PROPERTIES on your desktop. Click on the ADVANCED tab and pick PERFORMANCE SETTINGS button. The next screen has a series of tabs and once again select the ADVANCED tab. Then under Processor Scheduling click the Radio Button for BACKGROUND SERVICES (default is PROGRAMS). That will give priority to the MJ over data packets or programs when conflicts occur. If you are using a router, you may also need to set the MJ to have priority over data there too. When in the router remember that MJ uses ports 1070 and 1080 then UDP as well as TCP Protocol.

Additionally, I did find out that it does not work on a computer where you need to connect to a VPN. VPN's and MJ don't play well together.

Big Bear Local · 05-06-2011, 08:38 PM

I have been told they don't work well with Hughesnet satalite network. I know Skype doesn't. To much delay.

edj · 05-06-2011, 09:05 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by K-Star

I've been using MJ for about 1.5 years. It is not so much the signal strength as much as it is the speed that is needed. MJ says you need at least 200K upload speed for it to work. At 200K, I find it to be very choppy. At 400K or better it works pretty well. On thing to do is right click on the COMPUTER ICON then PROPERTIES on your desktop. Click on the ADVANCED tab and pick PERFORMANCE SETTINGS button. The next screen has a series of tabs and once again select the ADVANCED tab. Then under Processor Scheduling click the Radio Button for BACKGROUND SERVICES (default is PROGRAMS). That will give priority to the MJ over data packets or programs when conflicts occur. If you are using a router, you may also need to set the MJ to have priority over data there too. When in the router remember that MJ uses ports 1070 and 1080 then UDP as well as TCP Protocol.

Additionally, I did find out that it does not work on a computer where you need to connect to a VPN. VPN's and MJ don't play well together.

Thanks... I did not know about the 'Processor Scheduling'. I changed mine to 'Backround Services' and I will see what difference it makes with my Magic Jack.