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Topic: Giving up the landline phone for cell-only service.

Dennis Benjamin
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1445
From: Denton, MD
Registered: Feb 2002

posted 12-26-2008 04:09 PM

quote: Chris Slycord
In short: No.
Without a warrant, it is illegal for them to intercept your calls, whether they are from a land-line or wireless. Just because you CAN do it with certain equipment doesn't make it legal.

Dude - you have no idea whats going on out there in the wireless world. Have you READ the Patriot Act?

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Frank Angel
Film God

Posts: 5305
From: Brooklyn NY USA
Registered: Dec 1999

posted 12-26-2008 04:38 PM

Whoa, Jack -- that Cell-Socket interface is exactly what I am looking for -- many thanks. It seems a fairly model-specific, although they do indicate they will be expanding the models that the unit can accommodate. I'll follow this closely!

Scott hits on some substantial reasons why one would want to use standard telephones instead of a cell phone. Very valid. I know first hand about outages. When we had the blackout in NYC a few years ago. A power outage is a time when communicating becomes quite critical and it became immediately obvious that you really want a system that is NOT dependent on the power gird for communications; our cell phones were useless.

And for us, the main reason we want to use our standard phones is because of our existing setup with phones in multiple rooms. And Tim, even though, yes, you can carry the cell unit around with you, that still renders your phone service as personal, not communal. Only you can answer an incomming call. In a home with multiple extensions like ours, any one of us can answer one of the extensions in any room anyone happens to be in -- a major feature for us. The cell phone without an interface such as this cell-socket thing will always remain a personal phone and fairly unworkable in a household with many people. Besides, I HATE the idea of being tethered to some electronic thing hanging off of me....besides, there's no belt or pockets in my jammies -- my perfered style of attire a good portion of the time when I am home!

Scott, as for Vonage, and I'll assume other VoLP systems, they can easily ring multiple phones, especially if you are using the solid state "electronic" phones. As I said, we have a total of 8 phones, but we don't have all of them ringing at once. As you point out, the number of ring circuits they can drive are limited, but for most home setups it's usually plenty. We only have two ringers that we have switched on; one is an old mechanical unit -- a very unique Bell Telephone stand-alone ringer they offered only for a short time but one which we love and still use. It's a box with two beautifully sounding bells of different pitches that don't "ring" as in a standard oscillating telephone ringer, but the striker hits each bell only once for each ring cycle resulting in a very gentle and distinctive dual tone "ding dong." It can be heard through-out the apartment. One other electronic phone in the guest room is set to ring as well.

As for the unit that lowers the sound system -- it's more elegant than an ON-OFF relay; this unit is fed the phone signal and also the Left and Right channel in and out of the stereo signal. When any phone on the line is picked up or when it encounteres a ring signal, it smoothly fades the two channels of audio to either full MUTE or -15db. The thing is the size of a cigarette pack, yet it is one of the most functional things of all the gadgets I've ever come across. I've tried to buy more units to use in other systems I've set up over the years but the company has long gone out of business and there is no schematic. One of these days I am going to rip it apart and dissect it.

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