Why I brought a landline back into my house
bartkummel.netIt looks really nice, but do you even need the outside connection. I canceled our land lines connection a couple years ago when the service got bad (several instances of services out for a week or more). I got a little box to connect a cell phone to the phones in the house.
That's an interesting alternative. I don't know whether something like that is available here in The Netherlands. The SIP service I use seems to be good and it's really cheap.
Author here. The short version: I wanted the smartphones out of the bedroom, but still be reachable at night. That turned into a small PBX at home: MikoPBX (Asterisk-based) in Docker on a Synology NAS, two 1970s Dutch PTT T65 desk phones on Cisco ATA186 adapters, a Gigaset DECT base with five handsets, and a SIP number for the outside line.
Some things I enjoyed figuring out along the way:
* Teaching a 20-year-old ATA the Dutch dial tone (425 Hz); there’s an in-browser tone player in part 3 on my blog.
* A dial plan that connects internal calls after the second digit, since analog phones have no “call” button.
* A T65 that wouldn’t ring, because the extra-bell terminal had to be bridged to the b-wire, which used to be done inside the old PTT plug.
* A kitchen timer built entirely in the PBX: dial 55 plus the minutes, and Asterisk calls you back via a call file with a future modification time.
* Home Assistant as an extension: call it for tomorrow’s weather (written by an LLM from the national weather service data, read out with TTS) or to switch the lights.
The series is 8 parts with configs and screenshots. Happy to answer questions.