I converted over our previous home land-line over to use Magic-Jack. Magic-Jack works fine for basic voice conversations. Once in a while you get a call that is low quality with breaks/dropped words but this is more due to your home internet connection than the Magic-Jack service. Note that Magic-Jack blocks you from calling into phone numbers of conferencing systems such as WebEx; they want to charge you per minute to access these systems. The workaround for this is to start the Webex session on your computer and have the WebEx conference call your home Magic-Jack phone. Note that Magic-Jack does not support Fax, Modem Service (not even 300 baud) or Home Alarm monitoring. Also note that you will be billed the yearly 911 fee for your locality in the U.S. in the billing (and be required to set it up on-line); this yearly fee is usually around $9. I now have Google Fiber at my house (1Gb service). We are using the $10 per month Google Voice adapter with a new home number for voice service. Google Voice service does support Fax and Alarm system monitoring. However I still have the Magic Jack adapter setup and used with a second home speaker phone on my desk. Once in a while I use it for calls including business conference calls (Web-Ex calling me).
Thanks. I have very simple phone usage needs. Looking for something reliable is all. Lots of customer service complaints about MJ, which puts me off a bit.
I installed an obi200n with Google voice in my folks home. It's like 50$/yr because they wanted international calls. Otherwise free landline for life minus cost of device. Had Vonage before that with more reliable service, and better call quality
I recommend Ooma. It works great. If you don't want any extra features, all you pay is the approx $5 in taxes per month. It does require a one time purchase of their VOIP box. You can do voice/fax calls. Sound quality is great, if you have upload speed of 1mb/sec or better.
I just use Google voice and my mobile phone. I don't make a lot of phone calls so I use Google voice number for anything that requires me to input a phone number- easy to block the spam with GV.