Magic Jack

In the ongoing effort to reduce our living expenses to the least possible amount we purchased a "magic Jack". The plan was to eliminate the land-line, saving appox $30 a month. We would still keep a dry loop DSL line (cost for that is $35 a month).

First regarding the setup for the magic Jack, it was flawless and fast. I had it working in a very few minutes. Clarity is acceptable, my wife noticed some "clicks" present in the background, she also was noticing some background static when ever I wasn't talking. All this is minor though and completely acceptable given the price tag. That's the good news. That bad news is that I couldn't get an area code for a local number, so if people  call us from a land-line locally it'll be long distance. That ain't good. The only other thing with the magic Jack is that the application has to be running for the VIOP to work, which means you need to leave your computer up and running all the time.

Now since I've only got $39 invested in the magic Jack I'll keep it for further testing with hopes they might make my area code available. We might also take it to Vieques in Novemeber and see how well things work.

Along with eliminating the land-line we also plan on dumping ADT. I had called them in January of this year with the intention of canceling. They lowered my monthly monitoring fee to $20 a month. I still feel that $20 a month is too much.

It's been 6 weeks now since we cancled our Directv service and I can honestly say we haven't missed it a bit. Why we didn't do that a long time ago is a shame. We had Directv for 15 years, that's a huge amount of money we paid them.  What a waste. If your thinking about dropping your cable and are worried about missing it, believe me, you won't (even moreso if you use the internet for your news).