There are many people out there that do not have land-line phone service and opt to use their cell as their only phone. The only real drawback with this is that you don’t get the convenience of being able to have multiple handsets in the house.
But can you use a house telephone on a cell network, similar to the way Vonage allows you to use any house phone you want?
Yes.
What’s required to use a house phone on a cell network is a universal cell phone docking station.
One such product is PhoneLabs’ Dock-N-Talk. This unit is compatible with over 2,000 cell phone models where you simply dock the phone via cable (proprietary to the phone) and can then use a regular house phone connected to the dock to place and receive calls.
How much does it cost? The dock without Bluetooth is $150 and with Bluetooth is $200. If you think that’s a high price, it isn’t because regular land-line service easily goes over $200 in less than 6 months for most areas, meaning the dock will pay for itself in well less than a year.
Does it really work? To be honest, I don’t know because I haven’t tried it. I couldn’t tell you how good or bad the latency is between the dock and the connected house phone handset or how good the clarity of sound is – but it’s assumed there’s no difference in latency or quality between the cell phone itself or a connected handset through the dock.
On a final funny note, if I did have one of these I’d purposely connect a rotary phone, as in the kind with the real bell ringer, just to see if I could actually talk on a wireless network with one of those oldie-but-goodies. Hey, it’s all standard RJ-11, so it would get the job done, right?
(If you were crazy enough to do that, you could probably receive calls but not dial because wireless phone networks to the best of my knowledge do not recognize pulse dialing.)

Like what you read?
If so, please join over 28,000 people who receive our exclusive weekly newsletter and computer tips, and get FREE COPIES of 5 eBooks we created, as our gift to you for subscribing. Just enter your name and email below:



I don’t understand why someone would want to do that?
Because cell phones have bad tinny speakers, even worse speakerphones and when the battery runs out you’re forced to be tethered to the wall. Having a docked setup with an attached cordless set alleviates all those annoyances in the home – without having to have a second phone service just to use cordless handset(s).
Because cell phones have bad tinny speakers, even worse speakerphones and when the battery runs out you’re forced to be tethered to the wall. Having a docked setup with an attached cordless set alleviates all those annoyances in the home – without having to have a second phone service just to use cordless handset(s).
A friend of mine went completely cellular this way. Although it probably helped that he was working for a cell phone company at the time, and he wasn’t paying for any minutes, and he was the only one living there. But he wanted to be able to use normal wireless phones at home (and keeping the cell phone fully charged).
Another reason to use this is if you needed to fax something to someone with a conventional fax machine at home. I know there are cloud solutions to this but if you already have the fax machine available and no land line, in theory this would work fine. I would like to try the rotary phone experiment. I’m sure you are right Rich. I bet the cell network would be waiting for a tone keypress instead of a pulse signal.
DOS equis
why not simply use majic-jack ?
Because the Magic Jack service is separate service outside of a wireless carrier, requires the purchase of separate equipment and requires an annual fee to use, that’s why not.