Does anyone here in Miles City use the Magic Jack Plus? We just purchased one, and when we tried using it, we kept getting an "all circuits are busy" message for any of the numbers we tried when using area code 605 and just a dial tone for all the numbers we tried when using area code 406. The people at Magic Jack were no help. They are supposed to send us an e-mail. Has anyone else had this kind of trouble? Any suggestions to solving this problem?(besides taking it back)

We got the Magic Jack Plus for Christmas as well. We were disappointed that we couldn't get a Miles City prefix so we used Billings. We too cannot call Mid Rivers numbers, I believe because there is no agreement between both companies. We are able to call cell phones and Qwest numbers, and Mid Rivers numbers can call us on the Magic Jack. I've read that Magic Jack Customer Support is virtually nil, but we haven't ourselves tried contacting them. If you find anything out from them please let us know. We have been rather frustrated with the product as well.

So "magic" actually means "cheap piece of poop from China"? Guess they "jacked" some more money.

I have had the regular (not plus) for three years very few problems. When I did have a problem I was able to get help and fix it thru the Instant message thing they have. One thing is they don't have a number you can call which I still find a little strange for a phone company. For awhile I wasn't able to call 360 area code Verizon phones. I haven't tried a miles City #.

One thing is they don't have a number you can call which I still find a little strange for a phone company.

If I'm not mistaken they're not a phone company. Someone can correct me but I believe they're a VOIP... voice over internet phone service. Basically, it's like Skype but packaged a little differently. So, not having a number, in a way, is as surprising/unsurprising as you'd expect from an online service.

Is this a Mid-Rivers thing? I wonder because I have tried to get Google Voice to forward to my Mid-Rivers number and it worked at first, then started getting so laggy that it was unusable and not it won't call that number at all. It forwards to my Verizon cell phone but it won't go to my home phone.

I've heard good things about Magic Jack but don't know anyone that uses it in Miles City.

Levi, did you know that a lot of Google Voice numbers are actually purchased-up space and redirects from the 406 area code?

I wonder if that contributes to connectivity problems?

This is really interesting to me. I recently bought a Miles City skype number. It works flawlessly most of the time. I did make a call though to a Mid-Rivers number earlier this week and got really loud tones and the skype software got very sluggish and finally crashed. Perhaps more investigation here is required.

My daughter & son-in-law had the same problem as the first person who posted. Waste of money when they were trying to save money!

Richard,

Not that software programs don't have memory leaks or any number of other things that could cause them (or from the operating system itself) to bog down and become sluggish. There's a rarely acknowledged little factor that some ISP's throttle data. I have zero idea if any of your local ISP's do that - I'm just saying some do.

I've Skyped with people in Canada on one of their large providers and it was consistently only a matter of time until their connection started to degrade and eventually drop. Skyping with friends in the UK didn't experience that. Granted, there's lots of ISP's in either of these Countries but eventually that provider did come out with a bit of a statement about it. They characterized it as balancing data loads for more consistent service (not entirely unheard of or wrong) but in a way - some would call that throttling - dialing down your usage if you're sucking up too much bandwidth.

[This message has been edited by Dan Mowry (1/7/2012)]

[This message has been edited by Dan Mowry (1/7/2012)]

Dan: in this particular instance it didn't complete the phone call. I hung up and tried it again and there was a full 10 second delay from when I pushed the number button until I heard the tone. I need to do some additional testing. The original idea was that I could provide a local contact number that I could answer anywhere. Hopefully, Mid-Rivers telegraph equipment doesn't screw that up.

"Mid-Rivers telegraph equipment" --- one of your best quotes yet, Richard. Thanks for keeping even the boring techno-chatter amusing.!

I have had the regular (not plus) for three years very few problems.

I have always wondered about the Magic Jack and figured the price on it was too good to be true. We still have the good old fashioned phone service at home and have had zero problems in over 30 years.

The thing is, it's not for most of the world. Clark Howard is always pushing it especially for people traveling overseas. There's something weird about Mid-Rivers or some other thing that's weird in this area. Same with Google voice, tons of people I talk to on the internet love it but it won't work here.

Some of our guys had it in Iraq (set up from stateside) and it worked for them. I didn't quite understand how it was set up but I think their families stateside could call them, but they couldn't call home. The ISP server was on some island somewhere - I couldn't order a Christmas gift for my husband online from a golf store because they didn't trust the internet connection. Anyway - the original magic jack worked there.

I didn't realize you could buy mulligans over the internet.

Richard - you can't. Didn't you read my message? They wouldn't let me buy it

I think I may have found an explanation for the problems with Magic Jack on Mid-Rivers.

FCC Asked to Penalize Carriers Who Don't Complete Calls to Rural Areas

I have had a Magic Jack, not the plus, and I experienced the same thing. Most Midrivers numbers would ring but were never answered. So I called my sister and found that they never heard the rings. It seems Midrivers never put the call through.

I now use a Google number. If I use the Gmail window, using the addon, I used to get the same response. It would never call Midrivers Numbers. I could open a Google Voice page, intiate the call, switch to the Gmail page and answer it and the calls would go through.

However, recently all the calls from the Gmail page now go through.