Review of MagictalkboxMember review of |
Just a note to say that the service continues to work well. All calls I have made with it have sounded fine - no dropouts, noise, etc. Magictalkbox is a new service which is built around a plug and play ATA designed, it appears, just for this service. It includes several tiers of service. It also offers a byod option for 34.95, which is what I chose. That's for one year of unlimited calls to the US and Canada. Jose, the owner, said in an email that there is no hard limit on the number of minutes per month that are allowed, but that it is monitored, and anything that seems like business use would not be allowed. For me, that is no problem. $34.95 was the total price. If you like, you can add money to your account to be used for overseas calls. Since getting the service about two weeks ago, I have made a bunch of test calls, as well as real calls of 20 minutes or more. I haven't encountered dropouts or other artifacts. To put it another way, it sounds about as good as a call using a top service such as Voip.MS. Setting it up is standard: userid, domain, password - plug them into your ATA. When I was doing the free test, I had a problem getting dtmf tones to be recognized, which I fixed by changing, in the ATA, the dtmf field from 'auto' to 'inband-info'. After I signed up for the byod, I received an email from Jose, who asked me what codec I preferred and what dtmf setting I wanted. He also requested a phone number that I owned so that he could set that up as callerid (There is a management console, in which you can set the name part of callerid, but not the number). Callerid is working. As with all my voip connections to the US, the name part does not always come across, but the number part is working reliably. Mine is an outbound-only service, but voicemails can be received if a caller dials an access number and inputs your userid. And a DID is available for an additional amount. You can also receive calls made to your sip url, [userid]@psip.pchoneunlimited.com. Originally, I was not able to receive calls to my sip url, but Jose quickly fixed this and I can now receive the calls. And the voicemail works with this too. Magictalkbox sip urls are reachable via sipbroker *9694. So if you connect to a sipbroker gateway and enter *9694xxxx, where xxxx is the userid, you will ring the user's phone. Toll-free calls seem to be mentioned here a lot, so I should add that the ones I tested have worked nicely, both to Canada and to the US. The management console is actually rather sophisticated to my eyes, but I am using, so far, only the call log. At $3 / month, paid yearly, for unlimited calling to the US and Canada, and doing it via an ata rather than MJ-style through the computer, and getting good sound, it is unbeatable. To sum up, the basic byod service includes: Voicemail Caller id Sip url 'Unlimited' calling to Canada and the US Toll-free calling to Canada and the US If you don't need more, give it a try. You can get credentials to use it for free for some period of time. Hard to lose with a deal like that. Check the website for the details. www.pcphoneunlimited.com is the website. Followup comments:
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Magictalkbox
East York,ON
Contract price not specified. 
"Amazingly Cheap; Sounds Good; Works Well"
"Amazingly Cheap; Deserves more attention"
