My search phrasing must be wrong, as googling turns up nothing useful to me…
So, does anyone know of a cradle or adapter on the market that allows you to use a cell phone as your home’s existing wired phone system connection to the outside world: meaning your home’s hard-wired connection to the local Phone company would be disconnected, and the main access point would then be the cell phone, interfacing via the cradle connection to the other wired phones in your house (I assume the inevitable wall wart supplying power to the cradle would also be used to supply the ‘battery power’ to the wired phones). This would include dialing from, say, the wired kitchen extension through the cell phone cradled in the living room, and onto the wireless network.
And to the question ‘why’, I can think of many, many reasons why this would be quite handy…
I have seen these, but only for Nokia phones - that was like a year ago. I am trying to see if I can find them online now…
http://www.mylinkline.com/vox.htm
this the kind of thing you are looking for?
So you want to cut verizon out of the game?
I don’t know of any such device but don’t see any reason that such a device can’t exist.
Just to warn you that internet access via a cell phone is usually 14.4 kb/s.
If you have high speed internet access you could get a interent telephone, any area code and a good deal of time for about $26/month: http://vonage.com/features.php
They give you a broadband modem which sounds like you could wire up as you describe. This interent telephone soundds like they do it right, it doesn’t sound like it even requires a computer, just a broadband eithernet connection.
http://www.gottagetagadget.com/voxcelbassta.html
This link indicates it can be used with motorola, erickson, and nokia. just do a search on vox.link.
Damn those are cool. I’d forgotten about them until this thread but now im thinking I might get one when I get my next phone…
You don’t want to use a modem with a setup like that… instead, get a cable to directly attach your phone to a computer or PDA, and then the connection will be entirely digital (on your end). I suspect a modem would make the connection even slower than it already is.
Happy vox link user here. I finally got rid of the extra phone line!
Checking the Vox Link page, it does seem to be what I was asking about, including using wireless service as your sole phone connection.
No, I had no plans to use this as dial-up access, just that there are many different types of wired phones (speaker, large button, kitschy) for different purposes.