Landchark

in my hunt to reduce monthly bills i found magicJack and at that price i figured it was worth a try.
currently, we have the unlimited phone plan (along with the TV, internet bundle) from Charter.

i should preface this by saying that i’m not a company shill, have no affiliation to any voip service, yadda yaddda yadda. i did work for a bigger telecom company for a few years a few years ago, but that can’t be relevant apart from giving me some inside info on how the telecom industry works.

anyways…

ordering was easy on the magicJack site.
it did put on the pressure to get a multi-year contract upfront, but at this price, i can afford to waste that offer if i do want to renew after the first year.

got the unit in less than a week from ordering.

i tried it first with my main desktop just to see if it works, and yep, it did. plugged it in using the provided usb extension cord, pulled out the phone line (that goes to all the jacks in my house) from the charter phone modem thingy and plugged it into magicJack and instantly had a dial tone.

color me impressed.

made a few calls, got a few calls, everything seemed to run well for a couple days.

magicJack doesn’t offer a local area code for us so i took a nearby city, and then signed us up for a grandcentral account to forward to the magicJack number.

i also set up another gmail account for us to get grandcentral voicemails, i also send all magicJack voicemails there, so even if the mj vm is unstable, as i’ve read it can be, we should be covered by grandcentral.

then i tried to remote desktop into that computer from out of town and magicJack ground to a complete halt. couldn’t even get a dial tone.

i figured this was a bandwidth issue, because remote d is a huge hog. and since i have been looking for a reason to replace my current router, a netgear FM114P, because of wireless slowness, i used this as an excuse to go router shopping and make sure i get one with QoS so i could prioritize the  bandwidth.

upon recommendation from a network expert type person friend of mine, i got a DLink DIR-625.  works great once i got all the wireless settings configured. get just as fast of speeds on the laptops via wireless as i do on my wired desktop. very nice.

so the 625 has QoS built in and with some router magic can autoprioritize voip packets or something. i’m not going to pretend i know how it all works, all i know is that it does.  you can set your own QoS rules, if you want, that assign priority to machines (and ports) on your network but i haven’t had to do that yet as the built in auto-QoS seems to work just fine.

once i got that router installed, i could log into remote desktop and magic jack still ran fine. sweet. bandwidth problem solved. voice quality was about “cell phone in a moving car” quality.

i figured it was time to move magicJack to its permanent home, the jukebox we use to listen to mp3’s and watch divx/netflix movies on.
general specs: xp sp2 (up to date), athlon 2800+, 1gb ram.
the only bandwidth usage on that machine would be the streaming movies, which we’d have to pause anyways when we get a phone call, so it shouldn’t be an interference.
and getting the popup on the screen when a call comes in would actually be a nice feature so we don’t miss calls in case we are watching a movie at blast your eardrum volume.

so i ran a phone line to that computer and plugged in the magicJack.

everything worked fine, but call quality was “very choppy”.

so based upon some of the tips read on the dslreports.com magicJack forum, i ditched the provided usb extension cord, updated all usb drivers, and set the magicJack process in my task manager to be high priority.

when i called the test number, 909-390-0003, voice quality was very good (this was at about 5pm, in case that is relevant). so it would seem that those tips fixed the “very choppy” issue.

next thing i experienced: my voice to the external person is crystal clear. but, the external person sounds intermittently choppy to me.   that happened on both incoming and outgoing calls.  it wasn’t a constant choppy, just seems like randomly throughout a call, the incoming voice got a little bit of a stutter once in a while.

i’ve messed with the QoS on the router, enabling and playing with the QoS rule settings, for the source ip and port range (my computer) so i think that’s why my voice sounds great to external callers because those outgoing packets are prioritized.

after reading about how people set up QoS with tomato, i did some hunting through my server logs to see what IP was getting used when i was on the phone.  not an exact science and not really perfect but i found IP addresses in there for chicago and atlanta.

so i added those addresses to my destination QoS rules, and also added the minneapolis IP just to be safe.

exact settings, for the DIR-625 QoS:
checked: QoS enabled, autoUplink
unchecked: dynamic frag, auto classification unchecked
Rules:
priority 1
source: magicJack machine IP, UDP protocol, source port 5060-5070
destination: proxy1.Chicago.talk4free.com - vms1.Chicago.talk4free.com (use the ip’s), all ports 0 - 65535
added a rule for every server i might be hitting with magicJack: chicago, atlanta, mnpls

once i rebooted the router, i tried another call and BLAMMO, calls were crystal clear, both voices incoming and outgoing are fine with no stutter. it was as good as our line with charter.  sweet.

i don’t know that i need to give those rules priority 1, because that may be overkill on the choking off of other bandwith to the house, but based on our usage while on the phone we haven’t noticed any slowdown of our other bandwidth so i’ll leave it for now. if it starts slowing things down, i can always lower the priority until i get to a sweet spot of bandwidth speed and call quality.

for a load test, while making a call, i had my wife stream live365, and on my desktop, i turned on a radio stream and loaded 12 youtube videos at once.  call quality stayed the same and the radio streams never buffered and i loaded all the videos. don’t know that was the most scientific test ever, but it was a good practical test and magicJack passed with flying colors.

in case anyone wondered, i ran a voip speed test and pasted the results below.

Speed test statistics
———————
Download speed: 10499000 bps
Upload speed: 983296 bps
Quality of service: 99 %
Download test type: socket
Upload test type: socket
Maximum download pause: 38 ms
Average download pause: 1 ms
Minimum round trip time to server: 18 ms
Average round trip time to server: 89 ms

VoIP test statistics
——————–
Jitter: you –> server: 2.3 ms
Jitter: server –> you: 3.6 ms
Packet loss: you –> server: 0.0 %
Packet loss: server –> you: 0.0 %
Packet discards: 0.0 %
Packets out of order: 0.0 %
Number of supported VoIP lines: 6
Estimated MOS score: 4.0

overall, i’m very pleased with how magicJack works. it installed and worked well directly out of the box, especially for the price.
to get it to work with the same call quality as our current phone line did take a bit of tinkering and research, but it wasn’t that bad, and again, for this price, i’m willing to put in some tinkering.

we’re going to give it a week and if things stay stable, we are going to drop charter phone service. worst case scenario is if the thing craps out on us, or if the company goes belly up or something, and we have to get a phone line from charter  again.  in the meantime, we’ll save about $50/month, so it seems worth it to me.

hope this helps out someone who may be considering getting magicJack or having choppy voice quality issues of their own.

Tags: , htpc, magicJack //