I have had a number of people tell me that they would get rid of their land-line telephone lines if they had a way of using their in-house telephone equipment to make and answer cell phone calls.
This is especially attractive for a vacation home where you are paying 12 months a year to the telephone company and you use the phone line for a few weeks each year.
There is a fairly new piece of electronic gear available called a Cellular Bluetooth Gateway.
It makes your house phones look like extensions of your cell phone.
The Gateway plugs into your household telephone wiring and communicates with your house phones using the good old analog telephone protocol of dial-tone, ring-tone and touch tones. It communicates with your cell phone via Bluetooth.
When you pick up a house phone to make a call the gateway converts the touch-tone telephone number that you are dialing into Bluetooth codes and sends the Bluetooth codes to the cell phone. The cell phone dials the number it gets from the gateway. When a cell call comes in the cell phone communicates the call via Bluetooth and the gateway rings your house phones.
Caller ID comes through the gateway from the cell phone. Facsimile capability is not available with the gateway.
The gateway and cell phones need to be close to each other because of the limited distance of Bluetooth. Close, like in the same room. The low power version of Bluetooth in most mobile phones is designed for a range of thirty feet.
Depending on manufacturer, the gateway can manage two or three cell phones. There is a gateway available that can integrate a land line and three cell phones.
So, you can call the telephone company and cancel your land line. Hook up the gateway where you charge your cell phone, plug the gateway into a phone jack, "pair" the gateway with your BlueTooth Phone and be ready to go.
If your land line phone number is important to you, have the number transferred to a companion phone and use the companion cell phone connected to the gateway.
The typical cost of a BlueTooth Gateway is around $100 A typical monthly phone bill is around $35, a payback in under fthree months!
You can search for a Bluetooth Gateway using the following brands: XLink, Grace Digital Audio and GE.
We can order and install one for you with a single service call.
We recently installed a Cell2Tel unit from Grace Digital. The unit retails for $99. I tried it at home with my Panasonic 5.6 GHz wireless telephone system. It works flawlessly. We used it at a customer site to provide a Sensaphone with a dial tone so that it can call the owner if it detects cold temperature, water on the floor or motion in the main hall way. Cell2Tel was able to handle outgoing calls made by the Sensaphone as well as incoming calls into the Sensaphone. It is a very solid product with easy set-up. One item of caution, I set it up on an end table over my sub-woofer and it caused all kinds of cell phone noise coming out of the sub. Moving it to the next room eliminated the problem.
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