I have been trying to tighten my budget belt recently, looking for any way to save some money.  And I have seen tons of these Magic Jack commercials on tv about having a usb VOIP phone line.   I am currently paying just under $40 a month for telephone service and am interested in cutting that cost down.  So I have a few questions for any of you that use either Magic Jack or Skype.

Magic Jack?  Anyone here tried this product out?  It seems way to good to be true.  What kind of voice quality does it have?   Are there any hidden fees?  Does it even work?

Skype.  I know this is a widely used product but does anyone use it for their full time home telephone?  Or do you just use it for long distance?  Same questions as the Magic Jack goes here.  

Anything that can save a few bucks with nearly the same quality can't be a bad thing.  Any help here would be appreciated.  THanks in advance!

No one out there has either of these?

I have Skype but I don't pay for it. Therefore, I never use it.

I have never heard of Magic Jack.

magic jack, FTW!

We have it at home and just dropped our regular phone line. Just as long as you can have stand alone DSL, its worth it. Its 40 bucks for the equipment and the first year of service is included. Every year thereafter is 20 bucks OR you can pre-pay for 5 years for 60 bucks so in the end it comes out to be like 1 dollar a month.

There are only 2 issues:

1) it doesn't work 100% with the newest phones, but most phones made from like a year ago and before will work just fine. I've talked to support about this and its because a standard landline actually provides power to the phone and the magic jack doesn't give as much power so some newfangled phones do not receive the "message" to ring. The phone will light up when it receives a call, but will not ring.

This is somewhat isolated and only affects maybe 5% of existing phones. The solution to this is to hook up the MJ to a powered USB 2.0 hub.

2) your computer has to be on if you want to be able to receive and make calls. I recommend hooking up the MJ to a laptop with low power consumption where you can just leave the monitor on off all the time.

For international calls, i recommend buying a MJ for your international friends, setting it up here, then mailing it to them so that they now have a US number, then they can call and receive calls for free ^_^

Thanks for helping me out!  I hope this thing is as good as you say it is.  I will order it and then maybe give my own review of it next week.

Thanks again!

i'd get it from a radioshack so you can just bring it back to the store without any issues. Mailing it back is so much of a hassle (should you need to)

Too late, I ordered it on ebay for $35 including shipping already.