Linux Magic Jack?

[Lisa Kachold]

On Sun, Jul 12, 2009 at 2:34 PM, mike Enriquez<mylinux at cox.net> wrote:
> I  saw  a demo of Magic Jack which a USB thumb drive like device that
> lets you plug in a telephone jack and make all your phone calls via the
> internet.It claims to work only on windows.
> They claim that the annual fee is $20.00. Does anyone on the list know
> if this is available on Linux or something else exist that is similar.
> Boy, I like the price of $20.00 per year to make all my phone calls.
> Thanks
> Mike Enriquez
>
>
>
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Hello Mike!

The utilization issues for all VOIP, IAX systems replacing land line
phones include networking complexity, security and E-911 issues,
wherein emergency services can immediately verify your address.  I
wrote the PHP/SQL extension to the Affinity Voip Telecom SER switch
for their E-911 registration process so I have a good idea that most
people are not bothering to register their VOIP service; E911 is a
federal VOIP requirement at the provider level, however must be
maintained by the user at the time of service registration.

The network issues with all VOIP, IAX2 include NAT traversal which can
add more than a little bit of instability during setup and when the
network chances or is reset.

I am curious as to why anyone would even sanely consider buying a USB
"device", when you can easily use softphones like Ekiga (with a PSTN
VOIP trunk from axvoice.com $9.99 a month for instance) or Skype
($30.00 unlimited a year)?
Skype allows you to skype2twitter; your incoming calls can be
forwarded and recorded, various other cool voice analysis plugins are
available, etc.

https://extras.skype.com/
http://www.asteriskvoipnews.com/skype/5_most_useful_plugins_for_skype.html

There's an article/review that mirrors my sentiment exactly saying,
quote:  "there's a whiff of sleaze about it all".
http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2009/03/12/magicjack_far_from_enchanting/

Having built (and used home based and professional solutions) Trixbox,
SER, and Asterisk for AffinityVoip, GST Telecommunications,
Skymall.com and maintained intelligent dialers, programmed and
administered a Stromberg Carlson DCO, I am fairly well versed in VOIP
and I just have to ask "Why MagicJack"?  and "Where's the Magic"?

Why have essentially a client running on a USB key?  ...scratch
head...  When you can have it on your computer?
There are a great many hardware based solutions also around $30.00
(which is what the USB client will cost you after you pay for your
$30.00 a year throughput fees):

Grandstream ATA's:
http://www.grandstream.com/products/ht_series/ht503/ht503.html
http://www.grandstream.com/products/ht_series/ht486/ht486.html
(axvoice.com ships one of these with signup)


Of course, in a disaster situation, where power goes out, your client
will not work, unless you have your phone tethered to your battery
laptop running your client.   And it's certainly a great deal easier
to just have a client, since USB devices are not many on most
notebooks and it's not exactly the best time to be troubleshooting
UDP/NAT Stun traversal settings, during a disaster?

(In the old days with our digital PSTN POTS lines with 20 feet
"wireless answering machine phones", we had to get a plain butt-set to
make calls during power failure, but at least they still worked
usually.)   Hardware based VOIP phones, don't!

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