Basic Talk Home Phone Service Review

Hello There, today I'm going to be talking about basic talk home phone service Review. This is a voice-over IP known as VoIP. Which is just fancy talk for an Internet phone service that you can purchase at Walmart and also that basictalk.com. 

The unit itself costs $10 a month and the service is free for the first month. After that, it's $9.99 a month plus taxes. Which is a good deal because previously I was using Comcast Digital Voice and that was costing me close to forty-five dollars a month and this provides essentially the same level of service at a fraction of the cost here is the unit itself.

It is pretty small here's a pack of gum just to compare size. So it's even smaller than a pack of them in the back. It just got Ethernet to plugging into the internet you got fire blog you got your phone jack you can mount it on the wall. So it's got rubber feet. I don't know who's got lights let you know what's going on the unit itself is not much talked about but the services prize is pretty great.

It was pretty easy to set up. It comes with a nice instructional guide which I'm not going to pull it out. Because I don't have enough hands to do all this, but that has some simple instructions essentially you just have to power down your cable modem or your DSL modem whatever you have in your router.

Plug the unit into your router turn back on your network then you'll log on to basictalk.com to register your device in about 5-10 minutes from there you'll start having a field start getting phone calls or you can start setting the receiving phone calls.

If you want to transfer over your current phone number you can. It doesn't cost any extra for me. I bought the device on a Sunday and had my phone number switched over by the middle of the day Wednesday. 

So I didn't I had very little downtime at all with my phone number actually. I could use my old Comcast Digital Voice while I was waiting for this to switch over but anyways they say that it could take up to 10 business days but hopefully, you don't have to wait too long.

My experience with the device has been very good they're the very first phone call I made with it.

There's a little bit of a delay a little bit of latency with it. It wasn't even anything that bad but literally, I made it our phone call five minutes later had no problems and I have made numerous phone calls with this advice.

I know I called my brother who lives in Boulder for a good hour and a half the other week it came in just as clear. If not even better than my Comcast Digital Voice.

Today I had a phone interview which I think went very well wish me luck and had absolutely no problems and yeah this is a great substitute for your home phone service.

The only thing is that you can only call the US and Canada. If you call internationally it is probably not the device for you but I have to imagine a good percentage of people probably never call internationally.

So never have to worry about it now if you're not the most tech savvy person the rest of this video is really not for you but if you are I've got a couple of tips.

You can one suggestion I have is go into your router settings I have a Roswell el 600 in which I can go in and I can do quality of service set up which group gotta log back in just a second.

Sorry about that but anyways oh come on load up of course every router is going to be a little bit different but many routers include this QoS or quality of service setup.

So you can go in and I have plugged in the MAC address for my device and make sure that it gets the highest priority on the network. So if somebody else is trying to upload something to the internet or somebody's trying to watch a streaming video or something like that my phone call is not going to cut out the router is going to make sure that it gets priority.

It is going to stay connected but even if you don't have the settings. I want to worry too much because relatively speaking the voice-over IP does not use the highest amount of bandwidth.

So I want to sweat it but if you know how to do this, I would just do it just to cover your bases. Now you can also log in to your device. 

Actually, I'm already logged in let me show you you will have to figure out what your IP is.

I purposely set the IP for this device as a static IP so I could get back in but the default password is 123 and apparently with other grandstand or grants the Grand stream devices, I apologize admin should get you into more advanced functions every time I put in admin and I try it with both the capital a lowercase an all capitals.

It just doesn't work but really you probably don't need to be poking around your device too much but it was. 

It can go into these basic settings and as you can see I got things like it gets its IP from DHCP and then it has a whole bunch of its own preferred DNS servers and so I put in this first address on the top here into a IP search engine. As you can see it is registered to the Vonage network.

Now basic talk does not mention anywhere that it is a service ran by Vonage. It's pretty obvious though and this confirms it. So really this is just a cheap alternative to Vonage.

I know the unlimited Vonage account. I think is almost I actually let's go look up the Vonage offers a couple of different packages. I know their more basic one is their 300-minute one which is $12 plus tax.

So that's already more expensive than basic talk now. One thing is that I do not want to take your server no you can call internationally with Vonage and there are more features like digital voicemail and a couple other things.

But if you're just looking for a replacement for your landline or whatever and you don't need a whole lot of frills I'd stick with basic talk but yeah let's just compare it with their unlimited plan promo price is $29.99 a month. 

But that's only for three months and then it goes up to $25 from off plus tax. So I would be looking at $30 a month which would be saving me versus Comcast but I save even more Facebook talk now.

The main competitor for the basic talk is magicJack. Actually, if you go to the basic talk website they purposely compare themselves to magicJack though they're comparing themselves to regular magicJack and not MagicJack Plus. 

Anyways and you pay less initially you only have to pay 10 dollars for the device initially. But after that, you have the $10 a month reoccurring charge. With MagicJack, I don't know the prices of my head. 

You do have to pay more initially but um you only pay what you pay um for the device. 

You get one year of service and then it's considerably cheaper for the service after that. However, I purposely went with basic talk because I've had some lesson stellar experiences with magicJack and I wanted a nice solid home phone service. So if you're looking for a cheap alternative to your landline but you want something that's quality I would recommend basic talk and yeah if you have any questions please feel free to leave me a comment every day out.