Does a cell phone forwarding to a land line product exist?

I have a very limited number of day time cell minutes but unlimited anytime mobile to mobile minutes and unlimited anywhere minutes on my home's land line. Under our family plan I could add a phone for $10/month and leave it at home. Then if I could call the "home" cell phone and have the device route/forward the call to my land line I could circumvent the grevious limit on my day time outbound cell phone minutes.

Surely some enterprising folks have come up with this kind of product. I'm almost sure I read about something like this a year or so ago but I can't recall now.

Reply to
mark.alanzo
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  1. Yes, you can forward your cell number to a landline. Check to see if there are extra charges involved.
  2. There are devices that will let you add your cellphone to the phones in your home. See
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    for at least one model. Those devices fall into two catagories; those that have a plug-in adapter for your phone and those that use Bluetooth.

Reply to
BruceR

I call smarthome.com's tech support after looking on their web site to no avail. They did not know of any such cell phone line line interface product. Do you have a mfg /model number? Thanks in advance. Mark

Reply to
mark.alanzo

Well, there exist thigns to connect home telephones to mobile phones. However, the intent there is to use the mobile phone as the line instead of the telco, not vice versa.

What you're looking for is a device which answers the phone at home, then gives you a dial tone and allows you to place a call from cell -> cell -> land line.

No such beast.

Reply to
E. Lee Dickinson

I suspect that all the effort has gone into systems that work the other way around, allowing your home phones to use the cheap (free) long distance rates that many people have on their cell phones and allowing them answer their cell number. I think that this is a more flexible system. I am considering ditching the home line completely then upgrading my cell phone plan.

I did some searching and found a number of systems that then link home phones to the cell line.

Some of them are bridges that just connects a cell phone to the home phone wires and let it behave as a plain phone line. Some of them let the home phone connect to a land line in addition to the cell phone. Dock and Talk -

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Some use proprietary wireless phones (with additional handsets available) and no wiring needed.

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?item=B-ELBT595

Reply to
B Fuhrmann

"With the ELBT595, Uniden introduces CellLink, the latest cordless technology that lets your cordless home phone access your cellular phone's minutes. Of course, you'll need a Bluetooth-enabled cell phone, and the economic advantages of using "free cellular minutes" will depend on your cellular agreement, but CellLink offers obvious convenience to existing cell customers. Plus, the ELBT595 offers a built-in digital answering machine, expandability to 10 handsets, enhanced caller ID with photos, an advanced phonebook, and recordable customer ringers--truly a comprehensive telephone solution. "

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-- Bobby G.

Reply to
Robert Green

Try this instead:

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Reply to
BruceR

Just to be clear, before anyone spends money mistakenly: I believe Bobby and Bruce have it backwards.

OP is looking for a way to use a cell phone docked into some device at home, along with free mobile-to-mobile minutes, in order to allow him to make free calls from his cell phone while out and about.

Reply to
E. Lee Dickinson

Even if you do forward your cell phone to a land line, I believe anyone calling in to your cell will still activate the minute timer for the cell (after all you *are* dialling its number). I recall that one of my technicians thought he could do the same thing and he wound up using up his minutes without even realizing it (no warning messages to the call-forwarded line, it just suddenly went "dead" in the middle of a call). When he contacted Rogers, they said that he was using "air time" regardless of where the phone is forwarded as long as the incoming call was dialling his cell number. Bummer, eh?

Reply to
Frank Olson

"Frank Ols> Even if you do forward your cell phone to a land line, I believe anyone

Frank, you are misunderstanding his request. No outside line is dialing limited cell time.

He would be using unlimited cell to cell minutes. What he needs is a system that answers the cell phone and patches it to a land line. The system then needs a way to accept an input that tells it what long distance number he wants and dial it on the land line.

Reply to
B Fuhrmann

OP: Yes, this is exactly what I seek!

Reply to
mark.alanzo

There used to be a product called Vox.Link that did this. You can still find them:

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BH

Reply to
Brad Houser

Thanks. The "light" is finally "on". :-)

Reply to
Frank Olson

Look at this too:

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Reply to
BruceR

If you're looking to give out your 'home cell' number for people to call, and have it picked up on the home 'landline' phones then you're not going to accomplish saving any minutes. You'd have to forward your cell number to the home landline number. Many cell plans will let you do this, but not without incurring some consumption of minutes in the process. You're 'bouncing' the call through cell to home, while the actual cell handset might not be involved, the switch and cell service are and thus the minutes. Now, they COULD cut you a break on this but why would a cell company do this when then can offer a better plan for a few bucks more a month?

What're you trying to accomplish? Cheap calls from the handset during the day when you're travelling? Or something else?

Reply to
Bill Kearney

I think he wants to get an extra "walkie talkie" cell phone - usually calls between these two are unlimited - and have one of those cellphones able to connect to the home landline and have it dial long distance and local calls which are expensive to place from the cell directly but apparently nearly free from the landline.

Cell ---> free call ONLY to other cell --> landline --> free local & LD to anyone

Phone companies call such practices "tariff evasion" and will probably terminate people if they catch them.

Not sure any of us have gotten the right answer yet as to what would allow the poster to do the above. The Uniden device I cited comes close, but it's in the wrong direction, from landline to cell. It may be capable of the reverse but my brief read of the blurb didn't reveal it. It's most certainly going to involve a Bluetooth enabled phone, though.

Rube Goldberg might rig something through the headphone jack and some car door solenoids to press the cellphone buttons. You'd really only need to go on hook and off. With enough amplification the cell's tone could "dial" the landline phone directly once it was taken off hook and coupled to the cell.

-- Bobby G.

Reply to
Robert Green

Now that's the ticket.

Reply to
E. Lee Dickinson

Or you could use the asterisk PBX software on an old PC or other suitable (nslu2) device. The trick being getting asterisk connected to the phone via bluetooth. I've got a uniden cordless setup that allows pairing a bluetooth phone with the 5.8ghz wireless handsets but there's not a way to 'hop' over to the other landline. Nor is there a way to connect a regular handset to the uniden base. There have been various hacks attempting bluetooth connectivity with asterisk but the last time I checked none really worked for this sort of purpose.

-Bill Kearney

Reply to
Bill Kearney

And even if such a device were available I'd have real doubts about how well it'd work. The encoding/decoding of the voice signal would be choppy, at best. Cell calls by themselves are often bad enough, introducing another encode/decode layer to the process would very likely make it considerably worse. The echoing alone would probably be terrible.

That and as has been pointed out, circumventing tariffs is no doubt one of the many reasons gadgets like this don't exist.

Reply to
Bill Kearney

That's true. It's all a matter of tradeoffs. Is it worth it to the OP to tolerate potential bad quality in exchange for a wide, free calling area? Only he can make that decision.

I like the box that Bruce R. pointed us to, but at $225, that's a lot of prime time minutes. Still, if the OP talks a lot, the tradeoff might be worth it.

If the cellphone has a good "hands free" interface it might be possible to hack that into a landline phone. A long time ago RatShack sold a phone forwarder for 2 lines. Dial into one and it dialed out another number on the other line and then conferenced them when the other line picked up. Tonal quality and volume were awful, though.

The problem's made easier because the "slave" cell phone only has to answer and make the landline phone go off hook. That could be done a number of ways. Program a speed dial key to call the slave phone and then when the landline goes on hook, dial the number you want to call from the cheaper landline. Hopefully the cell phone will ignore any further touch tones because it's already connected but the landline's at the dial tone and will complete the call.

I haven't quite figured out how to end the call and convince the landline to go back on hook. :-) Probably some sort of monitor that could disconnect upon lack of voice on the line or after hearing some special "end tone" from the master cell phone.

-- Bobby G.

Reply to
Robert Green

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