Magic Jack Outgoing calls busy signal?

Question

I have a Magic Jack phone usb thing that's been working fine for about half a year. However recently when I make an outgoing call to say, my friends, or my family, it only works about half the time. It will ring several times and sound like it's going to make the call, and then it will display a fast busy signal and hang up. This isn't the person's phone as they are cell phones and should go to Voicemail if they're turned off.

I've tried unplugging and plugging my MJ back in, but that didn't seem to fix it. I haven't done the magicfix yet because I'm too afraid it might mess something else up. If people have the solution before I do this, please let me know, other wise, I'm gonna run that. If anyone knows how to stopt his from happening again, please let me know. Thanks

Oh yeah, and I'm running on Vista.

Answer 1

Your equipment (computer, magic jack usb stick) are probably all working fine.



Magic Jack "oversubscribes", and its their problem.



Oversubscribing is when a company has more customers than lines/equipment. Lets say (these numbers are examples, not specific to magic jack) that they have 100 customers, and 10 outgoing lines, most of the time that works because its rare that more than 10 customers will be making calls at the same time, but, if there are already 10 customers using it, and you are number 11, then your call won't complete.

Answer 2

There are two types of busy tones:



A slow one which indicates that the person you called is busy and a fast one which indicates that all available paths to the number you are calling are busy.



Think of the phone system as a tree network.



Each little stem is a phone number. To connect a phone call, you would find a path from your stem to the trunk (the phone company). Then you find a path to another stem. If it's in the same neighborhood, it'll be on your side of the double-tree thing. Each branch can only support a limited number of calls. Sometimes, this branch can hold fewer calls than numbers. It it's full, you'll get a fast busy tone.



Now, you ask, the friend lives across the street but it's still getting a "trunk busy" tone. What gives?



You live across the street, but magicjack's phone number lives on the other side of town. When you dial a number, it's like skyping into that phone across town and dialing the friend across the street. magicjack uses voice over ip with a DID (virtual phone number). In a given area code, these numbers all live at the same place (inside the phone company's office).



Let's say the phone company is provisioned for 50 of these virtual lines. If you have up to 50 magicjack (or skype, vonage, etc) users in this area code, you're golden. If you have 75, you're still golden as long as no more then 50 are using it at one time. The 51st person to use it will get a "trunk busy" tone or "all circuits are busy" message.



You can usually tell where a phone number is by it's prefix. (The first three numbers after the area code.) Change your number and the problem will go away. (Probably.)

Answer 3

Possibly yeah