Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Yes!!! It works!!!
The house I grew up in and lived in while going through college has only one phone jack in the entire house. This caused a lot of problems for me as a teenager when I wanted to call girls without my sisters listening in. I was really shy, it was hard enough to ask someone out without an audience, let alone with my six sisters listening and making comments about what I was saying while I did it. The lack of more phone jacks caused other less severe problems in college when I needed to get the internet at home (before high speed and wireless).
So, in the past I've tried these "turn an outlet into a phone jack" devices to try and get a phone jack in a more convienent place, and I have to say that in the past I've always been dissapointed with the results. The past devices (and most of the ones still on the market) use the power lines in your house to pass signals from your portable jack to a base station located near your real phone jack. The result is something that just barely works well enough for a static filled, difficult to understand, telephone conversation, and is completely unusable as far as a dial-up internet connection is concerned. Not only that, but as soon as someone turned on a vaccum, a fan, the dryer, or any big device anywhere in the house, it stopped working. (Not good when you're trying to ask someone out, and the phone line goes dead when your mom turns on the mix-master.)
I am happy to say that the "DualJack" is different. Now I'm finishing up grad school, far from home, and wanted to get my Dad a used imac for christmas so he could use the internet and send me emails. He's retired, and he can't afford a high speed cable modem to have a wireless router, and DSL isn't in his area. Dial-up is the only option, but, there's the same problem as when I lived there, only one phone jack, and no place near it to put a computer. I looked at everything around now days, and most of what's out there are still the power-line transmitters that don't work. THE ONLY THING THAT WILL WORK IS RADIO WAVES to transmit the singal from where you want the computer to be and where the phone jack is located. Some options out there required you to have another computer close to the jack with a wireless router to dial in and share the connection (the whole point is that there isn't room/don't want a computer by the jack). Others required you to pre-program a dialing device, which, based on reviews, all sounded dissappointing, difficult to set-up, and only worked well with a few ISPs. There is a device called the NEBO that's close to what you want, uses radio waves, but uses a low carrier frequency which will reduce your connection speed, and less likely to go through walls.
But the DualJack finally gets it right. It uses a 2.4Ghz radio frequency to transmit from the portable phone jack to the base unit, which is the same carrier frequency as used with wireless cards. It looks and sets up the same as the old "power line transmission" systems, but there's a big difference in the quality of the signal, and it's completely independant of any vaccumm cleaners, dryers, fans, mixers, or anything else you might be using in your house. The sound quality when using it for a phone I've found to be next to perfect, and when you're using it with a computer modem I found little or no reduction in your connection speed. My Dad's imac is set up with this thing down the hall from the phone jack, and it's getting an excellent dial-up connection. It works. Plain and simple.
There are only two complaints or words of caution that you should keep in mind. If I could I'd give this 4.5 instead of 5 stars. The first is that you should use a phone cord with 4 lines on the connector instead of two in the connection to the computer and between the jack and the base station. It doesn't matter if you're just going to use it as a phone, but I found it didn't work quite as well for a modem if you used a cord with only two lines in it. (I'm not sure what the techincal term is, but I'm talking about the number of little wires you see if you look at the end of the cord that goes into the jack). I think the cable that comes with the dualJack only had two lines, which is why I'm complaining. My second complaint is the price. $80 on sale? $100 regularly? This is basically the same technology as a 2.4GHz cordless phone, right, which you can get for a lot less than $80. Maybe there is something more to it I'm not seeing, some technical difficulty that had to be overcome, but I don't see why they need to charge that much. I don't see why it shouldn't be $50. However, if you keep in mind that it costs around $40 to $50 to buy something that DOESN'T WORK, spending $80 to buy the DualJack, which DOES WORK next to perfectly, isn't so bad, I guess.
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The RTX wireless DUALjack lets you add a telephone jack wherever you need one. Works with telephones, fax machines, satellite set top boxes (DISH, DirecTV), digital video recorders (TiVo). Plug & Play simple installation--no tools required. Eliminates unsightly wires. Secure, wireless, 2.4GHz radio technology. No connection fees or service calls. Superior to power line carrier (PLC) type solutions that can be affected by noise on the power lines.110V operation (built-in energy efficient power supply).Includes base unit, extension unit, telephone cord, and manual. Support available on-line (www.dualjack.com) and through 1-800 number.
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