Comment by scrappyjoe
1 day ago
I set up a little neighbourhood pbx this year on an oracle cloud always free instance. Took a couple of days.
Any family can buy a WiFi-enabled office phone and I’ll set up an extension for them. It’s working great! My six year old had a 15 minute chat with classmate while we were making dinner today; they have arranged a play date for next Monday.
A couple of weeks ago a 5 year old invented prank calls. Every now and then the phone will ring and we’ll pick up and she’ll sing a a couple of lines out of Frozen before hanging up. It’s made our community much closer.
Sadly, all the busybodies in my community would make this unbearable, since they'd have direct lines to people instead of having to wait to see them outside to complain to them.
I mean, you’re not required to answer. Nor to have the ringer on. Nor to have the phone active …
CenturyLink started on somebody's porch.
The original party line was tied together with barbed wire fencing between farms.
I also run a PBX.
and a PBX behind a VPN firewall.
Can you point to an article on how to do this? This sounds _amazing_
Here’s my ansible playbook if you want to give it a go.
https://github.com/riazarbi/homephone
Well it beats asking for Amanda Hugankiss.
That's really cool. Recently I had the fantasy of setting up a PBX here in the house and bringing back "dial up internet" for me and my wife, as a doomscrolling mitigation measure. Probably won't work though, as we each have smartphones plus she wants her streamers to play back full-fat 4K.
You could absolutely set up some traffic shaping on a router which drops social media sites down to 56kbps while allowing Netflix to use as much bandwidth as it needs to stream in 4K.