Having just suffered through a paid television ad for magicJack, reading Jon Arnold’s recent post and Dan Barislow’s response to same, I have come to two conclusions. First, magicJack’s advertising is willfully misleading to customers, making deceptive claims about the uniqueness of its offering and the pedigree of its founders in an attempt to deceive consumers. In both web and television advertising, they claim to have the built the only nationwide network for internet telephony, which will strike any telephony engineer as  obviously untrue, and adds undue credibility to their marketing message.  In both their web and telephony advertising, they claim a three step install, where the third step is an eleven year old making a phone to her grandmother. Although I could go on about this one all day, I challenge any company to reproduce that demonstration in front of me, where an eleven year old goes to a un-prepped Windows computer, plugs a USB dongle into the front, plugs in a phone and makes a call in the less than ten seconds I saw on the commercial. (Better hope Nana picks that thing up on the first ring, and on the commercial the impolite fifth grader doesn’t even say goodbye before she hangs the phone up. Any chance she really wasn’t calling? ) The demonstration on the commercial is obviously rigged and purposed to exaggerate MagicJack’s installation process.  The deepest bruise comes when the announcer claims that the MagicJack was invented when it occurred to the founder that computers accessed the Internet over phone lines, so why shouldn’t we access phone lines over the Internet? I listened hard here, and I’m sure that the average consumer can only conclude that Dan invented Internet Telephony.  A claim of this magnitude not only dismisses the successful work of thousands of engineers over many decades, including many of the people I happily spend my life with and look up to, but in my book is proof positive of willful deception. Period. You thought Al Gore was over-reaching, but unlike Al Gore’s extemporaneous remarks, the message is repeated and calculated.

My second conclusion is that any company so willfully deceptive in its advertising must have serious corporate morality issues. As a professional in this field, my strong advice to any other professional, either technical or financial, is to distance yourself from this company, and fast. It’s amazing to me that a company with the business practices of a midway hawker has invaded our industry.  There’s no other advice I can give but to stay away.

If you are a consumer: my name is Thomas Howe, I am a degreed electrical engineer with over twenty years of experience in telecommunications, and in 1992, I was lucky enough to be surrounded by a hundreds of people who are part of the bedrock of the voice over IP industry’s leadership.  On behalf of all of them, I am sorry for whatever damage MagicJack will do to our industry’s reputation and to your pocketbook.  Nearly all carriers use this technology to carry phone calls inside their networks, and it’s solid as a rock.  I cannot, and will not, stand idly by and see these sorts of claims be made in public without speaking up. I’m calling the office of consumer affairs in MagicJack’s home state and I am forwarding a copy of this letter and my resume. If you are a consumer having MagicJack issues, I heartily encourage you to do the same. Even if MagicJack’s service is perfect, which I doubt, the ends don’t justify the means. MagicJack’s advertising is clearly designed to deceive consumers.

** UPDATE **

Since somebody decided to threaten my children in the comments of this post, I have disabled comments.