If you’re one of the few individuals like me who still have a home phone number at our house (at the request of family). You might be aware that in a lot of cases, traditional Plain Old Telephone Systems (POTS) are dead in most places (save for the few rural parts of the US). Most of these home phones are now powered by VoIP.
What isn’t dead, however, are the Plain Old Telephones in most residential houses that connect to these VoIP systems. Many of them are essentially just dumb phones with an analog adapter. Which means they miss out on a lot of the nice features that make VoIP worth it in the long run. Specifically, being just dumb old telephones that have to rely on a lossy analog signal, the call quality sounds horrible in comparison to modern cell phones that have Wi-Fi calling. And speaking of Wi-Fi, there’s also another problem that led us to today’s story.
We had recently gotten a new fridge. Typically our Wi-Fi router sits on top of it, where it serves an access point to a riverbed box downstairs. Plugged into the access point is our phone box from VoIPly that went to our home phone. Our home phone was always in an inconvenient location. At least until we had to clear the top of the fridge.
The phone‘s new home became our living room, where I unplugged our Sonos speaker from Ethernet to go make room for the phone, and that worked. Right until my dad accidentally cut the ethernet cord to the box setting up the ice machine.
At that point, I realized just how stupid it is how our phone, which does not feature Internet, but requires Internet to function, has to be tethered to Ethernet and RJ-11.
The analog phone receiver already needs to be in range of the base. Why isn’t there a phone that just connects directly to Wi-Fi?
Well, there are. They are a lot pricier than those traditional, analog phones. But they do exist. And there are also ones made by Grandstream, which is the same company that makes the analog adapters. And on Amazon, there is a cordless phone by them that basically is an all in one.
In addition, we can also get phone service a lot cheaper as well. Voip.ms seems to provide phone service at 1.10$ per month base, and then basically a penny every minute during a call after that. And considering that we don’t frequently make calls on our home phone that often, that’s quite great compared to the $15 we were paying per month.
The only real problem with the whole system is just how complex it is. And it’s probably the reason why home phones are stuck in the analog era. Becoming such a niche anymore with the rise of cell phones.
Setting up this phone is tough. There is a Web interface available to configure it if you don’t want to fiddle with the buttons. But there is still so much to set up. Both on the phones end, as well as the carriers end. You also have to juggle sensitive credentials. And a lot of it is probably why these SIP phones aren’t popular.
There’s also still a problem if you want to have multiple handsets in the house. Because the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) doesn’t really designed to be shared. On an analog phone, because a base processes everything to multiple receivers, it’s easy for multiple people to join a call from one end by each using a different receiver. And because it’s just one line, it doesn’t cost anything extra. But as far as I can tell, you can’t do this over this phone. At least not without setting up a whole PBX and stuff. Which again, dips back to the previous problem.
Either way, I like how advanced this phone is, and I like how you can dial IP addresses as if they were a phone number. I managed to set up the phone with Home Assistant so that you can now contact an assistant on it to control the home. I’m probably going to forget about it after two weeks, but it’s still nice to have.
So much of what I’ve discussed in this post really doesn’t apply to most people, they don’t care about getting the best out of everything, they just want something that works. But it’s nice when there are options for folks that want to maximize the value they get out of stuff. I just hope that the iPhone of the home phone emerges one day.