VOIP - What Works? What Doesn't?

["Bob La Londe" <none@xxxxxxxx>]

I've been playing with voice over IP telephone service for the last couple
days.  I've had a plain old Magic Jack plugged into a USB port on my desk
computer for a while now (2 years maybe).  I use it as a spare line, and for
the tackle and mold making sideline business.  It works pretty decent.
Sometimes its a little tinny sounding, but as long as my Internet works it
seems to work.  Since I upgraded my internet service a while back it has
worked much better.

Well, I decided to check out 8x8.  They are a service claiming to provide
professional grade VOIP services.  I know of businesses much larger than
mine who are using them.  So far I am not impressed.  They setup my account
wrong, and they couldn't fix it.  They had to send me another piece of VOIP
equipment to get it to work the way they set it up.  Its so I can send faxes
using an ordinary analog fax machine over their VOIP service.  It doesn't
work.  (I haven't had an actual fax machine hooked up in years for my
business, but I need to test everything.)

They claimed to make some adjustments to their compression codecs, and it
supposedly tested in both directions, but I never received a test fax.  When
I tested further just to make sure hardware was good I plugged both the fax
machine and the fax modem into a plain old telephone service (POTS) line.
Both pieces of equipment worked fine on POTS.  Then on a lark I decided to
plug the fax modem into the Magic Jack.  I don't figure there was a
snowball's chance in heck of that working, but amazingly it did.  Then back
to the VOIP port from 8x8.  No joy.  Call goes through, I can hear the fax
tones, but it fails every time.

Sadly I must conclude that 8x8 is not quite were they need to be just yet
for me to recommend them to my customers.  If they want a cheap phone line
for occasional use I think a Magic Jack would be a better choice.

I've got three 8x8 VOIP adaptors sitting in my communications room right
now.  All different models.