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Comment by adregan | Hacker News Reader

I have a toddler and I've been thinking about landlines for a while now. How do I teach him how to answer a call? I remember listening to my parents saying "this is she/he" when they answered a call and being amazed at that sentence.

But more than that, when he's a little older, how would he call anyone to get help? When a phone is locked, you can call 911, but it's not really obvious how. A landline would be a nice big target.

That said, our house, despite being a century old, doesn't have a single phone jack. I've been thinking about running an ethernet line for a VoIP phone, but they are pretty "buisness-y" and not the nicest to look at. Does anyone have a recommendation for a simple to use/nice to look at VoIP phone?

EDIT: Looks like there are adapters that take ethernet in (and I could split the PoE for power too) and go out to a phone cord. I would probably want to terminate it to a wall plate, but then I could just buy any old phone I liked.

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Can recommend having an oldschool landline phone.

When my oldest was 6 and started walking home from school by herself, we got a cheap push-button landline phone and an cheap no-name box where you would plug power and a SIM card into one end and the phone cord into the other end.

Taped a piece of paper with our phone numbers to the phone mount, and she would call us almost every day when she got home just because she could. And she still remembers our phone numbers by heart, 7 years later.

Maybe consider a DECT/WiFi cordless phone that can do VoIP?

Something like https://en.avm.de/products/phone/ (I think they're intended to be paired with the same company's router/modem though). Most of the usual VoIP hardware companies have some DECT phones in their lineup that don't look too different from the analog ones.

If you're put off by the design of phones that try to make joining meetings easier, maybe look for the more basic models, like Poly (now HP) VVX 250?

(I haven't used either model personally)

You may think I’m nuts for this, but I really want a corded phone. I have an old corner shelf from my grandmothers house that used to hold her old rotary phone in a communal space with a small bench and I really want to recreate that experience (minus the rotary, that is a little too affected.

I recently just set this up for my 5 year old.

I bought a Grandstream HandyTone 801 as a bridge. I use voip.ms as a service provider. Both are geared toward more technical users, but the service is very reasonable for the price. Instructions for configuring it are clunky but not too bad: https://wiki.voip.ms/article/Grandstream_HandyTone_802_-_HT8....

I had previously tried Ooma, but I didn't like that it wanted to sit between my router and modem.

Curious if you can set a schedule so that it doesn't ring in the middle of the night. Do you get spam calls like the old days?

I haven’t explored that. My intended use case was outbound calls, so I just bought a phone that allows you to switch the ringer off.

Rather than specific hours, I would probably just create an allowlist of friend and family numbers and trust them not to abuse it.

You can get devices that adapt an analog phone to VoIP, something like this https://a.co/d/54J6Svg

I've never used that device so I can't say how good it is, but something like that would let you use any analog phone.

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