Magic Jack, Ooma and a POTS Credit Card Terminal Working on VoIP

I wanted to dump Qwest.  That's the root of it, I really don't dig their way of handling customers.  I wanted to take advantage of my really nice internet connection, and use VoIP.  The only major hurdle seemed to be the use of my credit card terminal, and the occasional fax.  After a few evenings of struggling, I achieved success.

My old Tranz-330 credit card terminal was sure cranky about phone line quality, and everybody knows that the voice compression techniques used in VoIP are completely at odds with data transmissions.  So in other words, your credit card terminal that worked fine over Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) will not work over VoIP.  Not reliably at least.

Being a dyed in the wool cheap bastard, I started out trying the "Magic Jack™," a device that seems too good to be true, and it certainly was. Despite having a 15Mbit connection and getting the highest rating on the VoIP test, "Magic Jack" gave me jack squat in return for my money. I suspected as much at the outset: they had to be oversold given the paltry fee they're charging, and sure enough, it was so bad that even after trying every trick in the book from packet mangling to adding supplemental usb voltage (don't try this at home), I couldn't even get a voice conversation to work, outside of odd hours and by random chance.

I'll only say that the credit card terminal did somehow manage to work on one transaction out of about 30 tries with Magic Jack.  As for voice, well I've had higher quality conversations with people in Khazakstan using only my radio and a piece of wire.  And if you look around this blog a bit you'll see that I'm not kidding about that.

So since I was rightly suspicious, I had bought it at Best Buy, and they were happy to accept a return.

So, resigned to spend a little more, I then turned around and dropped $223 on something called "Ooma™" which promises free service after the initial purchase, indefinitely.  Sounds like a shaky business model to me, but considering the high price of the equipment relative to the ever shrinking cost of bandwidth, I figure they'll manage to keep it going for a few years at least.  Plus they have subscription based services that are a great deal.  So let's all pray for Ooma.

Back to the victory at hand:  After reprogramming my Tranz-330 to dial the *99 fax prefix for Ooma, with the help of the merchant provider of course, we're at 100% for credit card terminal operations.  Every call the terminal makes works.  Oh happy days.

The Ooma is a very polished device, and unlike the ultra cheapo Magic Jack, does not require a standalone computer.  It plugs into your router and pretty much takes care of itself. The setup is a piece of pie, and you're dialing nationwide in no time.

So it looks like Ooma is a keeper.  Bye Qwest.