Is there a way to hook my cell phone into my home phone system so I can lose the land line but keep ReplayTV?

March 17, 2004 5:55 AM

I remember reading a few years (months? internet time is odd) back about devices that you could use to convert your cell phone so it could hook into your home phone system. I'm not using my land line very much except for my ReplayTV to dial up at night. Has anyone used one of these devices or can someone offer another solution? This Replay can't use my ethernet without major reconstructive surgery.
posted by spynotebook to Technology (6 answers total)

It seems doubtful that your ReplayTV's modem could get a clear transmission over a mobile phone. And your phone provider might not allow (or might charge more for) "data" calls where it senses a modem tone. Am I misunderstanding the question?
posted by bcwinters at 6:17 AM on March 17, 2004

Response by poster: No. You are not. If there was an easy solution, I was going to keep the Replay. Otherwise, I will probably just sell the older unit and buy another ethernet ready one.
posted by spynotebook at 8:01 AM on March 17, 2004

Word on the street (at least the one my parents' house is on) is that these folks either currently make or will be selling a system soon that lets you hang your cell phone up in a cradle so it acts like a landline at home.
posted by yerfatma at 9:46 AM on March 17, 2004

Response by poster: I found this which is what I want:

http://cellsocket.com/index.php

It does not work with my cell phone, however.
posted by spynotebook at 11:13 AM on March 17, 2004

Cingular has a forwarding cradle that sends cell phone calls to your home phone, if that's what you're going for.
posted by werty at 12:37 PM on March 18, 2004

To expand a little bit on bcwinters' answer:

The encoding/compression algorithms used by digital cell phone networks are very closely tailored to transmitting human speech with the minimum possible bandwidth use. As a result they don't work very well with modem signals, which aren't very speech-like. Phones that can handle modem calls do so by forcing the cell network to accept the phone in a legacy analog mode. But the carriers hate this because analog calls take up several times as much of their alloted spectrum as digital calls do.

(More modern phones can send data over the digital network directly, instead of trying to send modem tones over the digitized speech connection. But this doesn't help your ReplayTV any.)
posted by hattifattener at 10:52 PM on March 18, 2004