The other day a couple friends were talking about how seldom they use their land lines, this had me thinking and when I went home I checked out my incoming call log, and it had calls from late 2005 in it. That’s certainly a sign of how little we use the land-line at home, this has been a topic of discussion a number of times in my household over the years, especially when it comes time to review our budget.
In-fact our decision to keep our landline was really based on three data points:
1. Families in the neighborhood should just know to call one number when they want their kids to come home
2. When people are at the house watching the dogs, or Andrew they should be reachable and should be able to call others.
3. Land-lines have a much higher reliability than cellular phones through power outages.
Well since #3 is the most common argument against dropping ones land line I should address that one first, the problem with this (for me) is I don’t have a wired land line phone I just have cordless phones and to-date I have yet to run into a situation where the cellular phone did not work (short of having to charge it in the car). The idea of paying $30 a month for this reason doesn’t cut it for us.
Working our way up to #2, this is a real problem but it could be addressed by getting a house cellular on one of those Family plans or by getting Andrew a phone.
And probably the biggest problem is #1, having to call potentially three numbers to reach someone is a problem but could be addressed by having a house cellular.
When I work through the above list I come to the conclusion that a house cellular (an additional $10 a month on most family plans) could be a reasonable substitute for my land-line, the thing is you really want to use the handsets you have distributed in your home already so people don’t have to change the way they do things.
Well I found the product that lets you do this, it’s called the Dock-N-Talk (www.phonelabs.com) either via Bluetooth or a wired connection you can connect your cellular phone to your PSTN wiring in the house, you get caller-id, call waiting, everything.
Another option I found was called Asterisks (www.asterisks.com), this is a open source software PBX that has stuff available that allows you to use your BT phone as a the outbound channel for calls.
I am very tempted to give this a try, we have already moved to VOIP so either of these solutions would just look like a different Terminal Adapter/Bridge in the closet.
Well I thought it was interesting, let me know have you given either of these approaches a shot?