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Phone Power vs netTALK
Compare Phone Power vs netTALK. Find out whether Phone Power or netTALK is better for your VoIP business or home needs. The experts at VoipReview have analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of Phone Power and netTALK and detailed analysis of the comparison can be found below.
User Ratings & Reviews
- 126 Reviews
- 36 Reviews
Overview:
Phone Power is a California-based VoIP company that delivers residential VoIP phone solutions throughout the US and Canada. Founded in 2005, Phone Power has a growing subscriber base and has earned a number of industry awards. In fact,the company...
netTALK is a residential VoIP service company founded in 2008 and based in Miami, Florida. The provider offers big savings on local and long distance calling with their residential VoIP service plans. Their products are easy-to-use products, so...
Provider Info
- Website: phonepower.com
- Headquarters Country: United States
- Founder Year: 2005
- Website: nettalk.com
- Headquarters Country: United States
- Founder Year: 2008
Plans Available*
- Home Phone USA/Canada Plan - $8.33
- N/A
Users Average Rating
Recent User Reviews
I was with PhonePower for 5 years and recently "ported" to CallCentric. I am so glad I did! This summer, we learned that our home phone had been ringing busy for over a week and important calls had not gotten through. After much hassle with PP, I researched other Voip providers. Bottom line: I now have superb technical support, excellent custom features, and a much lower bill. Other than getting no calls for weeks, I was unhappy for a long time about other issues. #1: calls going through Nomorobo spam filtering rang once at home before Nomorobo killed spam. Calls that went through had the Callerid screwed up. The PP web interface was always very slow, clunky, and limited options, such as a small limit on blocked numbers, etc. I did not realize that other Voip providers now offer modern, fully customizable features, web gui and mobile apps. The PhonePower billing, rates, and policies are abominable compared to competitive providers. For example, when my credit card expired and got a new expiration date, as they do every few years, I don't think I ever received any notice. If they didn't email, they certainly knew the phone number to call me on! That was 9 months before recent issues and I did solve the billing problem. By the way, the online bills never show a name, jut an address. Which makes it more difficult to port a phone number out. Probably not by accident: "Hotel California" that is easy to get in and a huge pain to check out. Buyer beware. (I did get ported with the help of CallCentric support asking for a screen shot of the payment screen with my name on it). Five years ago PP was the best I could do after Verizon dumped us. Now, not so much.
I have been a customer since 2009. The service meets my needs with the main line and a cloned line, giving me the ability to have 2 calls simultaneously. From the beginning I have brought my own adapter (picking it from the list of supported devices). I recently replaced it and discovered that the automated provisioning scripts don't support the setup of the second line. That's okay -- I contacted PhonePower and they put me in touch with one of their technicians who was able to give me enough information so I could manually configure my adapter. Recently (August 2023), I noticed that my adapter showed everything was good but calls weren't coming through (going immediately to voicemail) and then one of the 2 lines became inactive. I contacted support via email and continued to work on the problem (I'm in IT so I don't mind digging into problems and stepping through a reconfiguration process). Using my notes from the manual setup, I got things working again. I also noticed that my firmware on my adapter was significantly out of date and updated it too. I had it fixed before customer support reached out to assist. Things ran well for a number of weeks and then suddenly calls were going directly to voicemail again. That's actually not a bad thing since PhonePower automatically sends a copy of the voice mail to my email. So, I typically screen my calls anyway. To fix it, I have simply unplugged my adapter for a few minutes and then everything works fine -- I can call the house phone from my mobile and everything rings through just fine. I don't know if this is a problem at PhonePower or with my adapter or perhaps my internet provider. I'll dig into it one of these days but it isn't on the top of my list to fix. The amount of spam calls has been reduced by use of NoMoRobo which Phone Power provides free along with good instructions to setup. So, overall, I'm happy with PhonePower. The sound of the calls is excellent; customer service has been responsive and helpful; and it does a pretty good job filtering out spam calls. Some reviewers have reported caller id not working in the past. All I can say is that it has always worked for me since 2009.
Issue... No outbound toll free dialing ability to any 800, 833, 844, 855, 866, 877 or 888 numbers. I can not even call my ISP's toll free number, thanks to NetTalk. No calls from NetTalk about a service update, no email contact from NetTalk, no updates on my compensation request, nothing for weeks now. Incredible incompetence, a complete lack of technical service and/or follow-up. Service started out good years ago and has gotten steadily worse.
I've had the NetTalkDuo device (2nd gen) since 2010 or so, bought for $49.88 at Walmart. Included was 1 year of service. It's more of the Plain Jane type, no BT or WiFi, yet it's worked flawlessly for the past 12 years! Best of all, a full year of service of netTALK is about the same or less than a month of AT&T service (at that time). Actually was about $10 less after AT&T's extensive list of taxes & "regularity fees", which could easily be $15-20/month in itself! I hope the device lives another dozen years, keep it dusted and in a cool place to draw heat away. About some who are complaining about call quality, there's a recommended list of compatible routers for the non-wifi devices, this is likely the cause of some issues. I was using a low cost TrendNet router which was on the list & it worked perfectly. Later, went to using Linksys routers, all have been fine with my DUO device. Plus use a CAT 7 patch cable long before many heard of CAT 6, to shield against noise. For sure, when this one goes out, will get a newer model, hopefully price will be the same. I deeply regret that I didn't buy two of these, as were on promo at the time, regularly priced around $65-75 in 2010.



