Household Geek Stuff...

We decided to trashcan our Verizon land-line service and go with internet phones for the house.

You get a typical wireless router, but is has a couple of extra phone ports on it for powered wireless hand-held phones.  We were also able to 'port' our veteran land-line phone number to the internet router so the home phone number didn't have to change.

Because the hand-held phones need to be plugged into the router, I had both of our hand-helds plugged in and charging in my office.  I had been thinking about stringing new phone lines thru the house that would terminate in my office instead of out on the side of the house where the Verizon line came in. In this way I could move the hand-helds back to the rooms they were in originally.

One of the Directors at work has the system and had a better idea.  He disconnected just the external Verizon line from the phone junction box on the side of his house (to cut down static) and left the rest of the lines (going into the house) connected.  He then plugged the router's analog phone port into a phone jack in the room where he had the router.  That line (like all of them) are interconnected by the Verizon junction box on the outside of the house...he then had an internet phone connection to every existing jack.

To solve the 'no phones when the power goes out' problem he added a cheap UPS to the router.  There is so little power being used by the phones...he still gets over an hour of usage if there is a blackout.

Unlimited local and long-distance for $10.  T-Mobile.