[mdlug] The DSL and MagicJack thread

[Joe Doehler]

At 11:30 PM 4/17/2009, Drew wrote:
...
>Acording to ATT's website, it is supposed to be possible now to
>have a DSL line *without*
>POTS phone service for $19/month (basic, 786k-down) or $25/month
>(faster, 1.5M-down). And
>the MagicJack of course is something like $40 for the first year, and
>$20 for additional years.
...

When I moved a few years ago, I had to switch from cable to AT&T DSL, 
and I took my Vonage phone with me. Where I moved to, the max DSL 
speed was 128/256K (u/d), and the phone conversation would frequently 
and annoyingly be blanked out, making the Vonage phone barely usable. 
I imagine that the MagicJack has similar bandwidth requirements, so a 
speed of 768K should be OK, but make sure about your upstream speed, 
and that no ports are blocked. There are countless reports if ISP's 
slowing down VoIP traffic from competitors.

I now have cable and a MagicJack, and the combination works 
surprisingly well, even though the connection is through an 802.11b 
leg: I have nothing bad to say about it. I use that same WiFi leg to 
watch streaming video from Netflix, and there's enough bandwidth left 
for MagicJack to work at the same time. So a place like Panera would 
be a good test.

I still own the DSL modem that I used with AT&T. You can have it for 
the price of picking it up (I am in White Lake), with the caveat that 
you make it available to other members of this list for the same 
price (or less) if it does not work out for you. It is a Cayman 3500 
Series DSL modem, model 3546-002, made by Netopia; details can be 
found at http://www.netopia.com/support/

The MagicJack installation software is within the MagicJack itself, 
so it is a certainty that it won't work with bare Linux. It won't 
work with my W2K system.

I use the MagicJack to make outgoing calls only - those that I expect 
to be long ones. I use my cell phone (now with the cheapest plan) for 
all other calls; the idea is to keep my XP box off most of the time.

Joe.