MagicJack: Unlimited VoIP Phone Calls for $40 a Year

Technology has this amazing tendency to get a lot better and a lot cheaper over time, thanks for free market competition and our great minds thinking of new and innovative ways to make things happen. For example, computers used to take up entire floors of buildings and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and now they fit in your pocket in the form of a cell phone and can be had for next to nothing. The same thing has been happening with telephone service in the last decade. Long distance companies first fiercely competed over who could provide the most inexpensive state-to-state calling, and now VoIP companies are competing to provide the cheapest and highest quality internet phone service.

With most traditional VoIP companies, you will pay anywhere from $15 to $25 a month for unlimited long distance. Some companies have annual plans which make getting unlimited long distance calls a little bit cheaper. Either way, it's still much better than paying for a traditional long distance service. One company is now undercutting the competition by offering unlimited phone service for a mere $40.00 per year, that's just $3.33 a month. After your initial year of service, the price actually goes down to $20.00 a year.

The company's name is magicJack. They offer an extremely easy to use technology and are offering it at a rather affordable price. They provide you a small USB dongle which plugs into the back of your computer, and you can plug any standard telephone into it. It's pretty easy to setup the device, and it will then assign you a phone number, and you're ready to make calls.

Right now nobody's sure how magicJack can offer such cheap phone service, but if they go out of business, you're only out $40.00. That's a lot better than losing $100 or so from the now defunct Sun Rocket for prepaying for a year of service.

Overall the quality of service is fairly good, but you would not want to use magicJack unless you have a broadband internet connection. The call quality will drop dramatically if you're trying to use the service and don't have a decent amount of bandwidth to use. The only other downside is that you cannot transfer your existing phone line, however magicJack says that you will be able to start transferring your phone number to them as of Christmas of this year.

This VoIP product is fairly new in the market place, but it seems that magicJack is doing a lot of things right. If you're an early adopter, this is a great ship to jump aboard, but if you just want things to work, you might want to wait 6 months or so to make sure that magicJack gets all of the bugs worked out of their system and doesn't go belly up like Sun Rocket did.