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Comment by aceazzameen | Hacker News Reader

The answer is yes. But it's not just about speed. The higher speeds drain the battery faster.

I say this because we currently use an old 2014 phone as a house phone for the family. It's set to 2G to take calls, and switches to 4g for the actual voice call. We only have to charge it once every 2-3 weeks, if not longer. (Old Samsung phones also had Ultra Power Saving mode which helps with that)

2G is being shutdown though. Once that happens and it's forced into 4G all the time, we'll have to charge it more often. And that sucks. There isn't a single new phone on the market that lasts as long as this old phone with an old battery.

The same principle is why I have my modern personal phone set to 4G instead of 5G. The energy savings are very noticeable.

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I actually miss the concept of house phones. Instead of exclusively person-to-person communication, families would call other families to catch up and sometimes even pass the phone around to talk to the grandparents, aunts and uncles, etc.

That's a facinating obsevation! I hadn't consider the side effects of calling a common phone and interacting with other people rather than exclusively the one person you wanted to talk/text with. Probably distances you from (or never allows you to know) those adjacent to the person you already know.

My siblings are much older than I am and when I was 10 my sister was starting her relationship with now-husband. One time he called our house phone, I picked up, and said "yeah sister is home but she's busy at the moment so you can spend five minutes talking to me instead"

It may have been decades ago, but there was a time when it did not seem awkward or even unusual to just...call someone's house, or to simply stop by.

There was usually a purpose in this that was more profound than just being bored or lonely or something, but none was really required.

And maybe the person they were trying to find wasn't home right now, but that was OK. It was not weird to talk to whoever for a minute, or to hang out for awhile.

Nowadays, the ubiquity of personal pocket supercomputers means that the closest most people ever get to that kind of generally-welcome (if unexpected) interaction is a text message.

"Hey, I'm in front of your house. Are you home?"

And maybe that works more efficiently between two individuals than knocking on the door did, but otherwise this present way of doing things mostly just serves to further increase our social isolation.

Sometimes it seems that the closer it is that our technology allows us to be, the further it is that we actually become.

unfortunately, these days the inundation of spam from hucksters trying to sell you something, or worse, has now made everyone extremely distrustful of unprovoked interaction.

There is a lot less of that in IRL interaction than online interaction. I find months can go buy without anyone knocking on my door.

IT does not help with the just phoning bit but does with stopping by.

I do not get that many spam calls but I think that varies a lot, especially between countries with different laws about it.

Not everyone is paranoid.

Besides, telemarketing, door-to-door sales, and scams of all kinds aren't new -- at all.

All of these things existed Back In The Day when a friend might just knock on the door because they happened to be in the neighborhood, too.

i yearn for the days of dropping in unannounced , which is now a social faux pas

I set up an old rotary phone via twilio as a house phone for our kids. They just dial 1-9, each number is programmed to a different family member. Their cousins also have one, so they can call each other whenever they want. It’s great to also have a phone that just rings in the house, for when you don’t care about getting a specific person.

That sounds awesome. Do you have any more info on your setup anywhere?

I’m looking to set up an Asterisk server that takes calls over Bluetooth on any paired cell phones inside the house, or falls back to a VoIP line if no phones are at home.

Similarly, I find that it’s hard to catch family on their cell and much easier when I call their home.

does that not still happen for you?

passing cell phones around still happens for my family

I can vouch that pass the phone around is still a thing in southern Europe, or being sundenly dropped into a group video call where everyone gathers around the phone to be in view.

There are some more traditional home phones which work on 4/5G networks with a DECT handset which talks to a cellular base station. You might look into switching to that model to replace your "cell phone as a home phone" concept. It makes it a bit easier to add another handset to the DECT network and often means convenient cradles to charge the handsets while the base station stays in a good signal spot with plenty of power.

Just a thought when it comes time to change out that device.

That's not a bad idea, thank you! I always hate having to retire perfectly good working hardware just because a spec requirement change.

Given that it's a house phone, have you tried enabling Wi-Fi Calling (VoWiFi) in the carrier settings (if you have that option), and then putting the phone in Airplane Mode with wi-fi enabled? AFAIK that should be fairly less impactful on battery.

(Alternately, if you don't have the option to use VoWiFi, you could take literally any phone/tablet/etc; install a softphone app on it; get a cheap number from a VoIP number and connect to it; and leave the app running, the wi-fi on, and the cellular radio off. At that point, the device doesn't even need a[n e]SIM card!)

Or just port the number to Magic Jack for $20 and get a cordless phone $20 at Target that you have to charge once per week if you don’t just keep it on the dock, and pay like $5/mo or less for service. And you can make/receive calls from that number on a mobile phone using their app.

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