Voip Deals Blog

Yesterday (May 19th) the phonepower.com website underwent a site makeover with a Web 2.0 look and a green color scheme. The design change, though nice, is not the change that excited us the most. With the design change, PhonePower announced two new features for their new and existing voip customers, that we think is worth writing home about.

The new features are

Voicemail Auto-Delete

If you are PhonePower voip phone service user, you may have noticed that your voicemails remains in your voicemail box for ever and when it gets full, callers can’t leave a voicemail. So you needed to log on to your account and delete some voice mails manually to make room.
(more on how to access your PhonePower Voicemails from any where)

Well, that will be a thing of the past soon.

From May 31st you can use the new auto-delete function for voicemails. Once you turn it on, there’s no need to manually delete old voicemails. Simply set the number of days before deletion, and you’re done.

Free Softphone

Now you can take your Phone Power phone service service with you on your laptop, no matter where you go? As of May 19th, you can download the PhonePower softphone free from www.phonepower.com/account. The softphone software works on Windows pcs only as of now. Using a headset you can make or receive calls with your Phone Power number. And most importantly there is no additional cost involved.

Here is a recent email we received from one of our readers and we liked it, a lot. So we decided to publish it here in our blog. Do you have a similar story, do you use a voip phone service. Send us your voip story from our contact us page or just post a comment here for a chance to win $50 gift card from Amazon.com. (THIS PROMOTION HAS ENDED)

No purchase necessary. Just tell us your story and the best story will be awarded a $50 gift card by email. So be sure to use a correct email address while submitting your entry.

Here is the email from Mark, a long time voip user and a long time reader of voipdealsreview.org. Thanks Mark for sharing your voip experience with us.

Hello Voipdealsreview.org,

I have been a visitor to your site and a subscriber to your mailing list for a few years now. When I first found this site, I was using a regular phone company. The articles and reviews on your site prompted me to switch to voip and save some money.

With my wife’s permission , I signed up with SunRocket with the then ongoing 1 year free offer. The pricing was really cheap ($199 for 2 years for unlimited calling) and I was apprehensive about it all.

But I was pleasantly surprised when I started using SunRocket. There was a slight drop in voice quality.  But the price that I was paying for unlimited long distance calls in the US, the slight drop in voice quality was fine with me.

After having used Sunrocket  for almost 18 months with hardly any issues (I never had to call their customer service in the 18 months), SunRocket went out of business suddenly.

I had to make a quick decision to switch to another phone company ASAP. By that time I was hooked to voip for its cost saving potential and didn’t want to go back to a regular phone company.

I decided to go with Packet8. Packet8 was good but there were some shortcomings. The voice quality was not as good as Sunrocket. Then Paccket8 didn’t allow me to fax. Packet8 sells a fax service separately and does’t give their phone subscribers the ability to send faxes.

I stayed with Packet8 for a year until my contract was over. And then switched to PhonePower, again with a free 1 year offer for $199, thanks your site.

PhonePower offers everything that I needed for a price that’s better than Packet8’s. Here are some of the things that I like about PhonePower.

2nd Free Cloned Line – I work form home, and my wife is a stay-at-home mom. So we both need to use the phone during the day. PhonePower’s 2nd cloned line sets us free. Its like having two phone lines. I can make and receive calls while my wife is on a call.  And the best thing is the 2nd cloned line is absolutely free.

Faxing – PhonePower lets you send faxes over their voip line, unlike Packet8. I don’t send a lot of faxes but it helps when I need to send a fax occasionally.

Incoming Fax – Since I work from home, I get all my work related faxes online thorough an internet fax service that my company has provided. But with PhonePower you can receive faxes in your email through your regular phone#. When someone sends a fax to your phonepower number, the phonepwer system receives it and sends the fax to your email as a pdf attachment. Works for me when I need to receive a personal fax. And this service is also free.

60 Free Minutes of International Calls every month – Though I hardly use the free international minutes, I can imagine it will be useful for someone who have friends and families overseas.

Also I would like to thank you for this site and in a way having helped me to switch to voip.

(THIS PROMOTION HAS ENDED)

There are three ways to check your PhonePower voicemail, i.e if you have PhonePower voip.

1. Online

Go to www.PhonePower.com and sign on to ‘My Account’ and within your account, there is a voicemail menu on the left hand side. You can play your messages, delete old ones from there.

2. From Your Home Phone

Dial *21 from your home phone that is connected to the Phonepower voip adapter. If you haven’t set up your voicemail before, you will be guided through the set up process. You can skip all the set up options like personal greetings, voice signature if you want to keep the defaults. Then you will be asked to set up a 4 digit pin#. After that you are all set. You call *21 from your home phone any time to go to your voicemail box and manage your voicemails.

3. From An External Phone or Cell Phone
   

Dial your phone number and once you hear the greetings, hit *to go to your voicemail, you will be asked to enter your pin and once done, you will be able to listen any new voicemails.

Last but not the least, in addition to the above three, PhonePower also offers free voicemail to email. You can  setup within your online account to have Phonepower send new voicemails to your email address. Everytime you get a voicemail, a voice file will be attached and sent to your email, which you can download and play in any audio player like windows media player or quicktime.

I use PhonePower for my home phone service and my phone service was down for a day which I didn’t realized for a day being a weekend.

So on Monday when I realized my phone service down, the first thing I did was to go the PhonePower site and fire up a chat session with their tech support. The wait was short and a tech started working on my issue immediately.

He asked me do a few things, like rebooting the phonepower adapter using a code that I dialed using my phone. That didn’t work.

Then he had me physically power down the phonepower adapter by pulling the plug out  and plugging it back in after waiting for 20 seconds. This forces the adapter to a hard reboot and help resolve issues. Unfortunately that didn’t work either and phone was still dead.

Then he said he will try one more thing from his end and if that doesn’t work, he will have to escalate the issue to the next level of tech support. He spent a few minutes on his side and then asked me restart the adapter again by powering it down and powering it back up.

Voila, that seemed to fix the issue and my phone was back up and running. I made a few outgoing calls to my cell phone and to my wife’s cell phone and a few incoming calls from my cell phone and all the calls went through.

The experience with the PhonePower tech support was was good. The tech support was friendly, patient and  knowledgeable.

And I also give the PhonePower phone service five stars. I have had very few issues with them and no complaints so far. Whenever I have had issues, like this one, they have been promptly resolved.

Phonepower voip service is one of the few voip providers to offer free faxing capability with their regular phone service plans. If you have a fax machine you can send faxes using PhonePower, just hook the fax machine to the phonepower voip adapter. With its ‘fax enabled voicemail service’, you receive incoming faxes.

And more importantly ITS FREE.

Though PhonePower doesn’t promote this feature well enough on their website, the faxing feature is there to be used. All its voip plans have the faxing feature enabled. And its free unlike other Voip providers who doesn’t offer free faxing with their phone service but sell a separate faxing plan in addition to the phone service.

Let’s look at both inbound and outbound faxing using PhonePower phone servcie.

Outbound Faxing:

1. Cost: Free with the Phone Service
2. All you need is a fax machine
3. Troubleshooting Tips: If you are having difficulty sending faxes, try sending one page at at a time instead of sending a bunch of pages together.

Inbound Faxing:

1. Cost: Free with the Phone Service.
2. How it Works: Since its a free service, the way inbound faxing works is kind of archaic though. If you are expecting incoming faxes and when the phone rings don’t pick up the phone and let it go to the PhonePower voicemail. PhonePower will retrieve the fax and will send it to your email. But you must have the PhonePower voicemail enabled.

Remember, the faxing feature that PhonePower offers is not a business fax solution. Its meant for low volume home users users who don’t send/receive a lot of faxes. There are many online fax providers, like RingCentral, who offer cheap and excellent faxing solutions for small businesses. PhonePower fax for its phone subscribers is an just an extra feature which is very handy when you need to send or receive small number faxes. Please note that many other voip providers don’t offer this service for free.

PhonePower Voip is now offering 60 minutes of free international call every month for its unlimited voip plans. Calls to over 80 countries are in the list of countries. But not all cities in a listed country are included. So you will need to check if your city is listed.

Its a great free offer and does make PhonePower Voip an excellent service compared to other voip services

An apple to apple side by side comparison between the PhonePower annual plan and Packet8 freedom annual plan.

	PhonePower	Packet8
Cost/Month	$199/1 Year (plus 1 Year Free)	$239.99
2nd Cloned Line	Included Free, its like having two Phone lines	None
Call Quality	Excellent	Excellent
International Calls	Rates Vary	Rates Vary
Free Offer	1 Year Free	$24.99  Discount

Vonage has recently introduced its Vonage World plan at $24.99/month which includes free unlimited calling in the US and Canada plus 60 other countries. The plan is definitely very competitive. But after doing some calculations we think PhonePower may still be a better option than Vonage. Let’s look at the comparison below.

	PhonePower	Vonage
Cost/Month	$8.30/mo ($199/1 Year plus 1 Year Free)	$24.99
2nd Cloned Line	Included Free, its like having two Phone lines	None
Call Quality	Excellent	Excellent
International Calls	60 Free Minutes/Mo	Free
Total	$18.30	$24.99

For Callers Who Don’t need to make International Calls

PhonePower $8.30/mo Vs  Vonages $24.99

If you don’t need to call international, PhonePower costs $8.30/mo (paid once annually) or $14.95/mo (if paid monthly) vs Vonage’s $24.99. Plus you get a 2nd cloned line for free.

For Callers Who need to make International Calls

^*An average international caller who calls India (for our comparison here) spends around $5 to $8 month now a days on international calls using 3rd party calling card services. PhonePower (unlimited plans only) offers 60 minutes of free calls every month. Calling card service providers like Pingo offers 2.9 ¢/min India calling plan plus great deals like ($10 Free on sign up & half rates calls on Wednesdays which further bring down the effective rate to 1.9¢/minute) and pin less speed dialing.

For an average India Caller the cost with PhonePower & Pingo (for the India Calls) the total cost will be $8.30/mo ($199 Annual Plan with 2nd Yr Free) plus $10 (average India calls), total will be around $18.30 versus Vonage’s $24.99.

Plus PhonePower offers you a 2nd cloned line for free which Vonage doesn’t offer. A cloned line is like having a 2nd line. If you hook up two phones to PhonePower, you can make and receive separate calls form the two phone at the same time. Vonage doesn’t have this feature.

As the above comparison shows, by using PhonePower and Pingo an average India caller will save better than by using Vonage. And will enjoy the same benefits of excellent call quality, 2nd free cloned line, free 60 minutes of international calls every month, but will have to use a 3rd party calling card service.

I recently signed up with PhonePower for my home phone service. My Packet8 contract was nearing its end. So thought I will try PhonePower. So far the experience has been very good.

Signing up was easy and quick. I got the 1 Year free Offer ($199 for 2 Years of service and a free cloned line). The box arrived soon, though I was not in a hurry. I still had a few month of service left from my previous service. I waited till my number got ported to PhonePower.

Setting up the Adapter:
There are two ways any voip adapter can be set up.

1. Connect the adapter to the internet modem. Then connect your router to the voip adapter.
2. The 2nd way is to connect the router to the internet modem and then connect the voip adapter to the router like all your other devices (pcs etc).

PhonePower instruction manual describes only the 1st way, but I prefer the 2nd way. All you have to remember is, you are plugging your voip adapter exactly the same way as your pc is plugged in to the router.

Now the steps:

1. Power off your modem/router
2. Plug the ethernet cable that comes in the packet to back of your router (exactly as your pc is connected to the router).
3. Plug the other end of the ethernet cable to the WAN port (not the LAN port, this is very important) of the phonepower adapter. If you plug it to the LAN port it won’t work
4. Plug the phone line to the adapter’s Phone1 jack and the other end to your phone
5. Power on the modem/router and then the PhonePower router.
6. Wait for 5 minutes, the PhonePower adapter will take a while to start up fully.
7. Pick up the phone and dial a number. If it works, you are all set.
8. Setting Up the Cloned Line (if your service came with the 2nd Clone line)
   1. Sign on to the PhonePower website using your user id and password you created when you signed up.
   2. Click on Modify Services on the left menu bar
   3. On the next page Click on the ‘Manage Cloned Line’ button
   4. On the next page click on the ‘Assign’ button
   5. Connect your 2nd phone to the Phone2 jack of the PhonePower adapter.

PhonePower offers the same unlimited Voip plan and different price/contract terms. Their 1 Year Contract offer which comes with an addition year of FREE service ends today.

Remember, this is a yearly contact plan with an Extra 1 Year FREE.
Price: $199
Cancellation: After the 30 day period, there will be a $99 cancellation fee or the remainder of your contract amount, whichever is less.

PhonePower also offers monthly plans at $19.95 which has no contracts, if you don’t like the contract plan, but is priced higher. With free year offer you get unlimited calling under $9/month. Compare that with the $19.95 for the no contract plan.