[TriLUG] Digital phone recomendations

[David A. Cafaro]

I don't know what your current situation is with your cellphones, but
there is a completely different alternative:

http://www.phonelabs.com/

When I moved to my new house I dropped standard phone lines and
purchased the PhoneLabs Dock-N-Talk.  It allows you to hook up one
cellphone to your house lines and use them to receive and make phone
calls with your regular house phones.  I have been VERY impressed with
how well it works, I just disconnected my line to the outside from my
central phone connection, and plugged this in.  Now all the phones use
one cellphone as the phone line.  Even allows for speed dial, caller id
and call waiting functions.

Depending on what your cell phone plan is, a lot of "Family" plans allow
you to add another line to your plan for $10 which can share your
minutes with the other lines.

This might be an option worth looking into.

-David

On Fri, 2006-01-20 at 18:41 -0800, Barry Gaskins wrote:
>    Hi Everyone,
> 
>    My wife wants to save some money and get digital phone service.  We are
> currently paying about $50 per month to BellSouth for local phone and a few
> dollars a month to Quest for what little long distance we use.  My wife and
> daughter are using virgin Mobile for there cell phones (which they plan to
> keep).  We have roadrunner cable / broadband.  I have a coyote linux
> firewall feeding into network hubs feeding every room with internet (windows
> boxes for wife/kids and linux boxes in my computer room).
> 
>    The time warner digital phone service is $39  per month for unlimited
> calls but that does not seem to be the best deal.  Vonage has a $25 per
> month plan for unlimited calls that we are considering.  But the box they
> show has 2 phone jacks on it.  I can't figure out if I can just run a phone
> cord from one of those jacks into a phone plug in my wall to make all  of my
> current phones work or would I be limited to plugging 2 phones into the 2
> jacks on the box I would get from vonage.  Since I have a wife and 3 kids
> and  8 phones in the house that does not sound very appealing.
> 
>    I would ultimately like to get a card to put into a computer and have a
> linux box running asterisk that can do all the cool stuff that would enable
> but my wife is tired of waiting for me to figure out all the stuff that
> would require and I don't have any time for that right now.  I plan to do
> that at some point but I am thinking about doing vonage or something just to
> try it out for now.
> 
>    So does anybody have any suggestions on what company to use or warnings
> about what to avoid? Does anybody have their digital phone plugged into the
> house phone wiring to make all the regular phones in your house work?
> 
>    Thanks
>    Barry Gaskins