A year ago, I got my 8 y/o a landline (we used Ooma). It has been absolutely wonderful.
By far the best thing is that he makes his own playdates. I'm not the middleman anymore. He just makes plans and asks me if it's ok. And if his friend doesn't have a landline, I let him call their parent. It surprises them, but when he leaves a message, they love it. He's definitely had more time with friends because of it.
Another funny thing was he complained about writing a thank you note, so we said "OK, the alternative is that you have to call them". He called them, had a nice conversation, and thanked them. Honestly, it was better than a thank you note.
It's been one of the best purchases we're made. I feel some hope this will delay the eventual begging for a smart phone because he's able to do the most critical thing, connect with friends.
I bought two office phones for 30 euros each (Yealink) and set up a VOIP plan with voip.ms for my 8 and 9 YO kids.
I recently got divorced, so there is a phone at each house in case they want to reach out to the other parent directly. Ex and I did not want the kids to feel their right to reach the other parent needed to ask for permission
Family has Softphone in their mobiles, so the full family is a speed dial away.
My 9 and 12 year old share a "kid" phone that's just a hand-me-down parent phone. This partially meets that need, but it still gets used for way too much unsupervised YouTube time.
The thing for me that has really unlocked voice-based socializing has been the 12 year old jumping on Discord with his buddies from school. I feel like this mirrors well how I myself chat with my adult male friends—it's rarely in the context of just "a call" but rather while doing another activity. So when I see him joking around with them while they play Minecraft or whatever, that feels like it's a reasonable pattern for how to sustain friendships.
My kids are grown up, but my mom is worried about her AT&T service switching to VOIP. She didn't understand my description of Ooma, which I've been using for many years, but now I'm thinking that I should just bring over all the needed hardware and just call it a landline.
Landlines work when there is no power, which depending on where you live can happen more or less often but an important feature for an elderly family member especially if they live alone.
For my situation, telling my mom her voip phone was a landline would be problematic.
I do need some solution though, AT&T technicians tell me copper thieves are disrupting her service regularly.
Landlines only work when there is no power if:
- you use an old school landline phone (not cordless)
- your landline is actually copper going to the house (I've seen fiber to house + conversion to twisted pair by a box with a battery)
- upstream infrastructure either still has (possibly battery) power
If the isp doesn’t go down with the power outage you could probably get a big enough ups to keep the router and voip phone going for at least a couple of hours. Those things don’t use much power
I just setup a VOIP line at home and have it plugged into my UPS (along with my cable modem + network devices) to provide call service in the event of a power outage.
In a big black out live we had in Spain the infrastructure all goes down. I was the only with data because i had star link and batteries in the house. Not that I could call anyone in Spain though.
I dug out an old Motofone (the $40 eink candybar) for this reason, only to discover that it’s 2G, which has been decommissioned. Too bad, would’ve been fun to watch the kid learn T9.
I mean, sure you can find them if you look hard enough, but a phone that plays videos is not a dumbphone in my book. And I wouldn't hand it to my kid. It's probably worse than handing them a smartphone, because I'm guessing it is just dumb enough to have no parental controls.
Is there such a thing? Given it's radio waves in regulated radio spectrum, I'm not sure such a device would even be allowed to operate without a license. This said, there are 3G Nokia dumbphones (e.g. C2-01). I just had to stop using one because my operator tore down the 3G network here, like in most of Europe. (2G was already down since some time).
Edit: there are even 4G-VoLTE dumbphones by the way.
Make me really want to build one for my son when he gets to that age.
If I build it, I can control the full feature set and explain to him how it worked and he'll get the 'cool' factor too. With the raspberry pi I have lying around at home, it doesn't sound impossible!
It is really straightforward with some cheap hardware and patience. I have another comment on this thread with more breadcrumbs but I used a Fanvil "hotel phone" and voip.ms. Under $50 and an afternoon all in and you have full control.
Why does it seem like many parents are unaware that a hand me down iPhone can be heavily locked down with screen time settings? A list of things you can do:
- allowed list of apps, can reduce it to just phone, imessage, and utilities like weather app
- effectively permanent downtime, just set the end time less than start time such as 3:00 am to 2:59 am (technically 1 minute of non downtime). This blocks apps except for the allowed apps
- disable installing apps from app store
- disable adding new contacts and block calls and messages not in contact list. This allows parent to control who the phone can be used to contact
- none of these settings can be changed without the screen time pin
- also configure the phone with a minor apple account and add to your family group so you can monitor and control screen time settings from your phone.
So start with a super locked down phone that can only be used to communicate with parents. This is very helpful when they start after school sports. And the phone is so locked down they don't really have any interest in it.
Later when they're older start allowing communication with friends from school. But still only phone and imessage, no other apps. This reinforces that it's a communication device, not for endless scrolling and watching videos.
All of this is work, more work, admin work, things I would pay an assistant to do. Why would I want to be a system administrator when I can just not give my children systems that I need to administer?
This type of solution provides a simple system that requires very little administration and supervision. The problem with modern communications tech as it relates to children is that by default these systems provide access to every adult on planet earth to your child's inbox. That is not a feature that I need, but rather is a crippling design flaw much more likely to harm my kids than it is to help them.
1. The admin work of parental controls in Apple is non-trivial and obscure. I would guess there are something like 300 different knobs and settings you can control for each kid individually. The UX is terrible and there are features missing that seem extremely basic and fundamental. For example, I can't see how much time left my kids currently have, nor can I block any app "now".
2. "the phone is so locked down they don't really have any interest in it." This has not been my experience at all. My kids know that less-locked-down devices exist and frequently complain about the restrictions.
Indeed, there's an additional problem as well. There are settings, and then there are settings that allow one to change the settings. Not only are there hundreds of settings but they are duplicated in this way.
Configuring them from scratch is a minimum 20 minute job, and then you need to double and triple check to avoid mistakes. More like a half hour.
Same exact reason 90% of people don’t use the Shortcuts app. This stuff is obvious for you and me, but tedious and painful for everyone else, and it’s still easy to miss one thing that leaves it easy to circumvent. There are people whose full time job is managing MDM in IT departments, and it’s not just because of the number of devices they manage. It’s because this stuff is complicated. And that’s for grownups, whose judgment is expected to be better than 12-year-olds, and who can be fired.
Also Screen Time is a little better in a few ways than what Android offers, but it’s still a joke, is incredibly Byzantine, and limits your options as a parent.
Hello! Parent that's fully aware of this. My son has access to a landline and it solves the problem of tech as a tool vs a past time. If he thinks of his friend, he calls, friends reach out etc. No scrolling for something to do. I see my phone usage and am constantly trying to introduce friction into it. This is an extension of that concept.
Our kid breaks through the screen time regularly, even with new passcodes. Have a theory it is done from the wife's macbook, but not entirely sure. Gave up; would not recommend or use again.
Best (for older kids) would be a dumb cell phone like we had in the 2000s. Good for phone calls, texting, and simple offline apps like casual games, camera and music player. Maybe email. Definitely no web browser, youtube, or social media crap.
I don't know the extent to which such devices are still manufactured today.
What's going to happen immediately is that kids with equivalent phones will compare, realize that one has a lot of restrictions and the other doesn't, and it becomes a nightmare. They know that all you need to do is unlock it for them.
It's the same mental distinction between "For $200 we'll install rear seat warmers in your Tesla" and "For $200 we'll 'unlock' the already-present rear seat warmers" (that's the only hardware unlock I've ever paid for and I'm still bitter 7 years later).
> What's going to happen immediately is that kids with equivalent phones will compare, realize that one has a lot of restrictions and the other doesn't, and it becomes a nightmare. They know that all you need to do is unlock it for them.
Don't you think they will as easily realize their newly purchased TinCan is far more restricted than the 10 year old phone theirs friends received from their parents/siblings?
It's not restricted. It's less capable. Entirely different thing. And they'll view it as a completely different device for different purpose (voice calls vs. doom scrolling).
Specifically designed to be less capable is the same as being restricted.
It's purpose is explicitly to restrict the user communication to some predefined setting by a third party (the parent and company behind it) and the user is well aware of that, as this e-waste cost as much as a cheap or second hand smartphone.
First, you got it for yourself, so you chose to use a jukebox (or in other words : restrict your listening to specific titles on physical media) instead to impose it to other, which make a big difference in what people see as a restrictions(instead of a choice, which is self inflicted).
Chosing a Tin Can is obviously to restrict your kid usage of communication, it's the nature of the purchase of the device.
First of all, comparing a locked-down smartphone with a fully capable smartphone is different from comparing a smartphone with a 'landline phone'. That's like apples to apples compared to apples to oranges.
Secondly as far as I understand, you need the same type of phone at both ends to communicate with each other. Looks like the tin-can and other similar devices are designed to talk only to each other. While that is a restriction, it eliminates the avenue for a comparison. The friends are all on equal ground.
Thirdly, you're talking as if parental controls, especially unequal parental controls are a bad thing. Parental controls aren't like government or corporate restrictions. There is a necessary assumption that parents act in the best interests of the kids, unlike the other two.
Some parents are irresponsible and may allow their kids to consume alcohol or drugs. Will you allow your kids to do it too, because it may end up in comparisons? You have to talk to your kids about why that is a bad idea. It's wrong to assume that kids won't listen at all. Don't most kids refrain from drinking, smoking and driving till they come of age?
If this sort of control seems unfair or unethical to you, you're basically exposing your kids to serious dangers. And brain rot is a very serious problem that HN doesn't talk enough about. It ruins even the seniors. But for kids, it wreaks havoc with their IQ and personality.
Choosing a Tin Can for a child that doesn't have a phone isn't restricting them, it's empowering them with a new form of communication to chat to their friends. Getting my 10 year old a bicycle instead of a car isn't a restriction.
It's no use having an argument with thig guy. He simply has a more modern* definition of what "restricted" means.
*I don't know what to call it. It's like those people that buy a car with heated seats locked down by subscription and calling it "a feature" because some cars don't have them at all.
Compared to getting them nothing, yes. But the OP's point is that this doesn't prevent the child from mentally comparing themselves to peers that have a smartphone, and viewing their Tin Can as a "restriction" imposed by their parents.
Which it is. I don't understand the need to wink-wink-nudge-nudge pretend it's anything else by the others in this thread. Just own it, restrictions aren't bad by default.
I did that for my kid when he was 10 or so. He had it "hacked" before I knew it. If he had done it himself, I would have been proud, but some other kid did it. Never even tried after that. He's 17 now, he's fine.
I think we are except Apple lockdown experience for this is total shit show, not only you need to spend so much time but also if you need to change something (at least for me) it just reset all the previous options, because I turned it off to manually install something that was locked down
I have a device setup like this but I hate it, it’s possibly the worst UX I’ve used from Apple.
As another commenter said, the problem with parental controls on a smartphone is your kid constantly nagging you to approve installation of one more app, or extend their daily limit "just for today" (again).
With a device that's not a smartphone, you don't have this problem.
For some people like me, iOS parental controls are utterly and completely broken. I have tried to make it work over three or four years and just as many iOS releases - no dice.
About a dozen times in those years, the system silently failed open either completely or partially (eg. some restrictions still applied, but whitelists in Safari were no longer enforced, the app store was suddenly accessible again or time limits were no longer in place). Not once was there any indication on the parent device.
Several times, the only way to reenable broken restrictions was to wipe the device, because changes to parental controls simply stopped syncing.
The opposite is also true: Apple’s parental controls fail closed in inscrutable and impossible to debug ways. Yesterday, in order to share an iPad’s location with my iPhone, I had to totally disable managing Screen Time on the device. Every time I would click “share with <my name>”, the damn thing would tell me “Location settings can’t be updated right now, try again later”. No other combination of “solutions” on the Apple support forum, the random blogspam links, or the oh-so-helpful search-AI-summary thing even made a dent. I suspect something in the underlying data model was out of sync with the UI or something. Incredibly frustrating experience from the “it just works” vendor.
Yep. After years of frustration, trying every possible way to fix it, uncountable hours of searching, I asked Claude about it: "just subscribe to an external service". This is ridiculous, Android's parental controls work flawlessly. If I knew that beforehand, I would never had got my kid an iOS device.
Off-topic, but I hate sites like this. All links in the article are for other pages on businessinsider.com, but there's no link to Tin Can, not that I can find at least.
It's getting more and more normal that sites won't link out of their own "property".
I was thinking of doing something like this for text with LoRa. But, having kids I don't have time to do that. This seems really great!
I read the previous discussion, oof:
S04dKHzrKT wrote
Make note of the privacy policy[1]. Some users may not like the data they collect.
> Information Collected from Children: As detailed in Section 3.C, we collect voice audio during calls, call log information, and utilize the Parent-provided contact list in relation to the Child's use of the Tin Can Device. We may also collect device identifiers and technical usage data related to the Service.
Also note that if you buy a Tin Can unit, there's a noncompete clause: You agree not to "build, benchmark, or develop a competing product or service." So don't buy this if you work for a telco, or a voice communications service of any kind.
If a company puts unenforceable terms in their TOS, how likely are they to comply with the law in every other matter? No way would I give my kid a device made by these people for that reason.
I literally LOLed at the idea that purchasing a consumer product, at retail, could include stipulations on my future employment. And at the hubris of any manufacturer for imagining they could get away with such an absurd idea.
>Call Logs: We collect information about calls made using Phones, including the phone numbers you call or receive calls from, the date/time of the calls, and the length of the calls. We also collect network quality metrics and other technical data related to call performance. Please note that we do not record calls.
The version of the privacy policy cited in the previous discussion cited that voice audio is collected for the purposes of forwarding it to the other phone.
In addition to collecting all the metadata they also collect the voices of children recorded in voicemails.
Their policy says that the information they collect is used to "Send you marketing communications (see the section below for information about how to opt out of these communications at any time)" and to "Monitor and analyze trends, usage, and activities in connection with our Phones and Services, including to generate de-identified, anonymized, or aggregated data" and to "Target advertisements to you on third-party platforms and websites (for more information and to opt out, see the Targeted Advertising and Analytics section below)"
Remember that "de-identified" and "anonymized" is a lie. De-identified data can be re-identified, and anonymized data can be de-anonymized. Often trivially. There are even situations where individuals can be identified from aggregated data.
It would be better if they specifically excluded advertising uses of call metadata, etc. I assume this is getting mixed in from their ecommerce efforts to sell the devices. But how do you expect them to play back the voicemail if they don’t have it? What would be the point of "please leave a message after the beep" if the audio is going to /dev/null?
If it's a landline it could store the voicemail on device, which is how phones used to work (or prior to that, you'd plug an answering machine into the phone). A GB of flash would be basically unlimited and cost a couple cents. You could play an old school "your call could not be completed as dialed" message if it's actually unavailable due to a power/network outage or something.
It'd be extremely out of the norm for telco companies. Tin Can uses the calls and voicemails to collect data on children and sell that to others. That has zero to do with lawful interception. The moment Tin Can becomes popular enough you can bet that the government will be snooping those calls too
It would be pretty spooky if your voice managed to come out the other party's telephone without ever having been collected into and processed by the telephone network. Taking audio from one place and transporting it to another is what we pay it for.
I was thinking something like an esp32 + mesthastic / LoRa + REST API on the LAN, discoverable via multi cast. The "landline" is a tablet or phone with an app that talks to the esp32. Separately, a parent with the app does the Diffie-Hellman key exchange over SMS, NFC, or some other channel with the friends who also have the app, and you know their identity. The phone app updates the device with the friend's keys, they do the same thing on their end, and voila you're in business. The kids can talk securely, you can read that the kids say via the LAN, no goddamned third parties.
Funny enough, China already ran this experiment. Kids' smartwatches started as call-only devices for safety. Then they added friend lists, status updates, like counts, popularity rankings. Little Genius now has 48% of the global kids' smartwatch market [1]. Kids delete real-life friends for not having enough likes on the watch. Once a device enters a kid's social life, there's no market incentive to keep it simple.
I "made" something like this 7-8 years ago for our first kid. When I say "made" I mean I bought a "fixed wireless terminal" for $40 on eBay, a classic landline phone for $30, and a cell phone subscription for kids ($5/month). Then I connected the parts, and voila, we had a landline for kids.
Obvious benefits include low cost, full interop with all other phones, and having the kids learn our phone numbers by heart after punching them many times.
Regarding minutes, how many minutes? My kids basically hog my VoIP "landline" talking to their cousins 50% of the time they're home. (They're actually playing games together and using the phone as voice chat). I've been thinking of trying to get a second line for them to hog but didn't want anything with limited minutes.
My cellphone provider offers a limited kids cell subscription. Things like "can only call 5 different pre-approved numbers, no data traffic". I think the business model is that after a period of time, people bump into the limitations and upgrade to the $10/mo version.
Thanks for sharing the "fixed wireless terminal" tip. A HN post a while ago describe hacking a landline to a wireless terminal. But this tip removes the hacking :)
We bought a Tincan after a company parent-erg conversation led to a coworker discussing her experience with the product.
Is it the game changer we thought it would be? No. We thought my daughter would want to call her friends as much as she wants us to call their friends' parents to have them come over. We thought my son would use it as much as he texts on his gizmo.
Having said this, they are getting experience, albeit infrequent, with saying "Hello.... I love you. Goodbye."
And, yeah, when it rings, there is a mad-dash to pick it up. There is something uniquely pre cell phone ("reminds me of the 80s") about the joy and wonder of "Who could be calling me (at this hour)?"
> She said she heard about the Tin Can on a Facebook group.
Nice to safe the kids from that... But who will save the adults? ^^
Yes, social media is bad for kids. You start to realize that. It only took 15 years. The thing is: It's equally bad for you...
And you prove that every minute. Whenever you say something, and after three sentences, basically every topic ends up in something related to Instatoktube.
My only hope is that what we are currently see rising is similar to what happened to alcoholism and chain smoking.
I'm a happy Tin Can customer. For young children (5 and 7 in my case) it's especially delightful to give them a measure of autonomy, at an age where they don't yet have a mobile phone. They get to call their friends and family on their own terms, without any safety or "screen time" concerns.
It's especially fun to watch them discover the very concept of a landline: the keypad (they thought it was a pin code); the dial tone; the memorizing and writing down of phone numbers.
I would rather just have an old iPad and trust my child to use it responsibly.
Overall I think that while the Zoomers are doomed, because they grew up in the height of social media frenzy, generation alpha put two and two together and collectively noticed that screen time = no attention from parents. Some are okay with that, but others, like my kid prefer having attention above all.
Oh nice! I have been working on my own too! (https://havenphone.com). I was planning on the exact same model and pricing as well.
I am curious: have you gone down the tr069 rabbit hole? If not how do you plan to do endpoint management?
Are you using a Fanvil H2W? Too? That was my first phone choice.
I also learned of https://www.beanstalk.club from this thread as well. Looks like there are a few folks trying to do similar services without the proprietary hardware and waitlists.
Sure thing! Behind every "unlimited" plan out there, there is a per minute rate that small carriers like us have to pay in order to get access to the regular phone network and connect to any phone number in the world. On top of that, there's a monthly cost per phone number, per E911 address registration, per voice channel, etc. Then, you have the ever popular "taxes and fees", which can vary based on the user's location and can become complex very quickly. Not to mention FCC registration fees and taxes. Then there's the cost of the server infrastructure to register the phones and keep them online. And finally - STIR/SHAKEN implementation has a cost of registration and verification as well.
People can call each other but also businesses have 4-digit phone numbers that are shortened versions of the business name, like GUIT for the guitar shop.
"If parents consent [...] we collect [...] serial number and battery level [...] who called and call time and length [...] and Voicemails (messages and greetings)"
If you're going to get this product, make sure you pay attention when you set it up, and opt out if you are privacy minded.
We got one of these for our elementary-aged kids because it took off in our network of families at their school.
It’s so fun watching them talk to their buddies from school, planning play dates, just chitchatting etc. My favorite thing is when they prank call one another, cracks me up.
Maybe the novelty wears off soon but for at least the last month or so they’ve used it every day. It feels like it gives them a bit of autonomy they’re seeking right now at their ages, but in a relatively safe way.
Fun product, but not for me. We've given the kids old iPhones when they reached the age of 12 and they have been known we can check anything and everything on their phone. Each and every email is cc'ed to us and we log what we can (not that we actually do that much).
We have also told the kids we are not 24/7 actively monitoring them, because we woud like to trust them. Unless we think there's an issue they cannot, will not or are forced not to tell us, we will not intervene with their phone usually. They know we can track their phones anywhere on this planet and they don't care, because we are not acting as helicopter parents.
This has built trust between our kids and us parents. It forces us as parents to start trusting the kids and the kids get the freedom they want and need.
Is it 100% perfect? No, not by a long shot. It's a balance that may be scary for parents. We talk with them about stuff like doomscrolling, social media drama and privacy. They show us memes, tell us about their school life and usually do not care if we happen to see some private conversation on the corner of our eye.
Do the kids make mistakes? You bet. That's part of their life. Do we as parents make mistakes? Absolutely. None of the kids came with a manual. :)
Thanks for linking to it. Folks, before you rush to offer your genius ACKSHUALLY ideas about how Google Voice will let you do "the same thing as Tin Can for free", please, please, think about what GV does and, more importantly, does not (Hint: Whitelist).
Can you even attach a POTS or POTS like device to Google Voice anymore? I was looking into this last month and it seemed like they had removed that feature and the devices people were using (they had stopped selling them some years ago) to do it stopped working recently.
I have an Ooma phone now and I just plugged my existing phones into the Ooma box which then works the same as an old landline for the most part.
Just put a Google Voice line behind a FreePBX or Asterisk and you get all the call filtering you want. You can even make your internal numbers or whatever.
I first found the Tin Can cool, but now seeing their privacy policy, it's definitely nothing for me. I'd just use a normal VoIP cordless phone (e.g. Gigaset makes various models), or even a normal corded phone with a VoIP ATA. Some of them might even have integrated whitelisting, but I didn't check.
> Alarmingly, some Gen Zers don't say "hello" when they answer a phone call; they expect the caller to just start talking.
I'm an older Gen-X and I've stopped doing this unless I recognize the caller. I'm not going to give a scammer anything to build a voice print on. I also use the stock greeting for voicemail instead of a personal one.
Y-Zer myself and I do the same thing. I never initiate the communication when called unless I am expecting it or I know who the caller is. Otherwise, they'll know when someone picked up because their side will stop ringing, and they'll only get awkward silence until they start talking. Often times it's an automated voice system that will not begin until prompted by the callee, so it hits a timeout and hangs up.
The number of calls I get where it's either dead silence in the other end or clearly a call center based on the noise can only be categorized as "too much".
I had two silent, barring some office appliance noises, voicemails just today.
The number was on a spam list, but somehow managed to leave a "message".
The most surprising thing is that it was obviously a person calling and not a bot, as I was hearing the rustle of something (mouse?) being moved over a desk.
Yes, people think this behaviour came out of nowhere. It’s because if you are younger, phone calls are not the default (only two friends ever call me) and overwhelmingly are scammers or salespeople.
I've been actively trying to think of a better way to answer the phone without sounding rude. but without giving up my name or mentally accepting whoever is on the other side (like hello tends to do)
I normally don't answer calls I don't recognize the number to, but if I might be expecting a call and have an inkling it might even possibly be spam, I just answer with a short 'ya?'
Slightly rude, but saying nothing at all is just bizarre to me.
Edit to add: One thing I've done for the last decade or so is use a number from an area code I don't live in. Most of my spam calls come from the same area code, so if I see that I know it's spam or a wrong number.
I clear my throat. Do it loud enough that the other end can tell someone is on the line, so they'll know to start the conversation. It isn't a rude "WHAT" type answer, but it doesn't directly acknowledge the caller, and is not inviting a conversation. Its a common enough act that it's not suspicious nor weird to hear during a conversation, and therefore its not off-putting if extended family or clients called from an unknown number.
It doesn't share my voice (for fingerprinting, demographic leak, etc, smh).
Also works as a bot filter - Humans tend to start with a "hello..?" because they're not sure anyone is there, while robots use the non-zero audio as a signal to start talking with full confidence.
> mentally accepting whoever is on the other side (like hello tends to do)
I don’t get that. How is answering the phone mentally accepting the caller? What does it even mean to mentally accept? Is it that you don’t want to talk? Then let it go to voicemail and decide if you want to call back or not? I think I’m missing the point.
Same here (xennial), it confuses lot of telemarketers out of their script, if someone start talking with me I ask them "do I have contract with you?", if the answer is "no", I hang up, since it's clearly someone selling something.
related call scene from Fight Club how Tyler properly answers the phone (not answering but calling back and his first response is "Who is this?"):
For the nerdy who might want to set up their own similar system for their kids, and let their kids pick any landline phone they want, you can get an ATA (Analog Telephone Adapter) on eBay for cheap, then connect it to a Raspberry Pi with Asterisk, and any VOIP provider, to make your own PBX. (https://www.littlebytesofpi.com/raspberrypihomephone/)
It blows my mind that the current Cisco ATA is $150+.
For the service I am building (havenphone.com) I used Grandstream HT801 with success with voip.ms. I don't love how easy their cloud can take over the device though.
I'm not sure if they're still available, but the PAP2T was a wonderful piece of kit - just an ethernet port and 2x RJ-45 jacks for old style phones. You can set up custom dial plans and use any VOIP SIP provider you like. You can trivially edit the dial plan to restrict certain number prefixes, and set up custom short numbers - so for instance my "landline" had 81 for my mum, 82 for brother, 83 for sister, etc. but you could also just dial regular numbers.
If you run an asterisk server on your own box, you could easily set up a private SIP network just for you and your kids, or your kids and their friends, etc. and either run a SIP client on your mobile for your use and a VOIP SIP gateway if you want your kid to be able to call a friend's mobile.
EDIT: I just looked and the PAP2T has been discontinued, but there seem to be lots of units available new from China that look identical and are sold as Linksys PAP2T, and some unbranded units that look the same but with blank labels. I've no idea if these are fully compatible with the real PAP2T, but they might still be worth trying.
I did this but using Twilio, a Grandstream HT802v2, and a basic AT&T wall phone. Caller ID sorta works. I really tried to find a phone that would make a satisfying sound when slammed down, but I found that no one makes good, solid corded wallphones any longer.
The toughest part was figuring out which set of wires (my house had like 5 lines somehow) went to that particular jack in the kitchen.
If you live in Germany and have a Fritz!Box router, you can just buy a second old-ish Fritz!Box and a simple landline phone (from the likes of eBay, Kleinanzeigen...) and hook them up via WiFi.
Voilà, telephone service as it used to be. No proprietary payphone with questionable ToS and privacy policies needed.
I'm glad it's a push-button phone, and not a rotary phone. There's a hilarious YouTube of today's teenagers tasked with making a phone call on a rotary phone:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OADXNGnJok
The interface on a rotary phone isn't self-explanatory.
Just got our Tin Can a few weeks ago. The hardware is "eh", but the service is pretty great. The ability to approve incoming/outgoing numbers before being able to call/receive calls is very handy to cut out any spam calls that you'd get with a normal land line.
I think it is mostly a supply/demand issue. Most of their models are sold out, so they are trying to raise prices so that only those who really, really want/need one gets one. I think that they simply just mispriced the product initially. Soon enough there will probably be more competition that will help drive down the price.
I am working on a similar project. I have something working for my own needs and a few other families already but a long road to go before making something GA.
There were three major things I wanted to do differently from Tin Can:
- I wanted to use off the shelf VOIP hardware so if the company ever went out of business I (and any of my users) had an escape valve or could just sell the hardware.
- I wanted to have a code base I could open source. (not open source, yet!)
- I wanted flexibility to offer ATAs (devices that let you connect any ol' "analog" phone)- some of my parent friends wanted cordless "DACT" phones, interestingly.
It has been quite an adventure entering the world of VOIP.
The SIP protocol has so many esoteric options (understandably given its history!) it could make TLS look simple.
My most recent learning is this crazy protocol called TR-069 that ISPs use to configure endpoint hardware like home routers, cable modems, and VOIP phones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TR-069
Also, interestingly every cheap (sub-$50) phone and ATA I have tried has a built-in OpenVPN clients.
Oh, and one more interesting thing Grandstream ATAs are able to be taken over by the Grandstream cloud service by just providing the ATA serial number and mac address on the back of the device- I did not love that workflow when considering long-term security. (:
If you have $50 and some time to kill you can do it all yourself right now. In voip.ms you can use the phone book and the caller id filter to create a "*" hang-up rule and an "allow phone book" rule.
Seems like there are a bunch of alternatives popping up including some DIY solutions. Which is really awesome in this space. Check out https://www.beanstalk.club/ I've done some work with these folks. I love their bring-your-own-phone approach. There are so many cool old-school phones out there, even on ebay. We've also seen lots of success with Beanstalk and a simple $20 cordless phone. Kids love wandering around chit-chatting. There's also a ton of momentum around the https://www.waituntil8th.org/ pledge.
We actually have one of these between our group of friends and their kids and it's awesome. The kids call each other to chat and setup play dates or to go run around in the street. Our kids will call back home to let us know they made it to the other persons house, or let us know they're coming back home too.
The tactility is incredible, and it's so just so cute to watch them chat away (5 year olds!)
Did this exact thing for my four and six-year-old kids. I used an Ooma Telo Air[1] (Free + ~$6/mo in taxes and fees) and an old vTech landline phone. It's been highly successful in our house. The kids have (monitored) independence to call grandparents and aunts/uncles. Watching them translate written down 10-digit phone numbers into button presses is fun too.
For three or four endpoints all within the home, you could do this with just ATAs and not even need a SIP server. Many ATAs have a configurable "dial plan" that will let you map a number to an IP address, thus giving you the ability to call the other terminals directly within the LAN.
I got two DECT cordless phones for my house and tried to set up RustPBX on a raspberry pi. But I got snagged because it wasn’t playing nicely with flowroute, and I didn’t want to burden the project with my complaint. I guess I’ll end up using FreePBX but it sucks because RustPBX really looked promising.
Wonderful idea. The kid can call their friend "Let's meet outside". Then they go outside and (must) leave the phone at home. They use the phone to organize no-phone time together. Might be good for adults too.
For instance my boss couldn't call me while I'm out and about. What you expect me to carry my landline with me?
I know somebody that’s been landline-only since the 70s and only recently got a cell phone that’s strictly used for one specific unavoidable 2FA thing. One of the happiest and most professionally accomplished people I know.
I like the idea. We tried with licence free walkie talkies, but it did not catch on. What it worked is the xplora watches. Only approved contacts and we can also contact our kids and check GPS position . They are a bit buggy sometimes but mostly fine
Yeah I've seen some parents use this to great success. Seems to also allow them more freedom to allow kids to explore a bit more on their own. Like it's the 90's.
This is a nice idea, because it physically limits the place the child can call from. Even a very under-powered phone sets them free.
However, a new severely under-powered phone with no graphics or apps would probably meet the requirements of not being sucked into the grown-up world too early, and the kids can maintain their own contact lists.
And they'll grow super-fast thumbs like we had to in order to text :)
Got inspired by this and setup voip.ms and a grand stream for this. Just a “landline” and the monthly costs way lower and you don’t have to use the crappy tin can phone.
In the age of FT audio calls and such, it seems out of place. I get paying for the hardware, and even a bit of a premium because the UI has so many parental controls. But charging a monthly fee seems surprising since the differentiation versus FT/GV/etc. is on the UI side, not the "you can talk to your friends" side. There is no monthly cost to a UI.
FT audio calls are in the same boat where if everyone you knows has an iPad you can make calls within that walled garden for free and don't need to be allocated a phone number. Admittedly more useful since so many people have an Apple product.
Anything where you want a phone number and to communicate with the rest of the phone network, I'd expect to pay money for it. Google Voice is the (only?) oddball here.
If you want to call POTS numbers, seems reasonable to pay a fee. voip.ms (of Canada, I think) charges ~ $2/month for a number and ~ $0.01 / minute for calls to US/Canada, calls to other subscribers are free. They work with deposits and a balance. Something in that range seems reasonable... maybe a little bit more if there's some work to make it specifically kid friendly (parental controls for incoming/outgoing calls?)
I am working on a similar service for my own needs (and some other friends). But, my current plan is to hit $100/yr or so but the hardware is included in that cost. I am assuming $2/mo for costs of the number and minutes and retail costs for VOIP hotel phones is about $50. Hopefully the hardware costs amortize out and then I can offer a discount to users on subsequent years.
(If you want to go DIY you can save quite a bit of money too- I provided some breadcrumbs for doing that in my comment on the parent)
You don't want to be able to communicate with your doctor, kid's teacher, someone who is coming to repair your home, a neighbor who just moved in, etc.?
I have a Tin Can for my 8 year old – it is terrific and he loves it. He can call friends, grandparents, and his cousins; it is more reliable than the DIY version I was cobbling together with a Pi and some Legos; and my spouse or parents can supervise or update it too.
> she's found another way to put off getting her [8-year-old] daughter a cellphone
I don't live in the US but my child, who is 9, does not have a cell phone nor does any of his school mates. They "chat" when they see each other in school, or when they hang out together to play after school.
We've got a tin can phone and the biggest positive for us is the phone can't make calls or receive calls from numbers that we don't approve first. I know other parents who have the phone line through the cable company that gets hammered with spam calls.
This seems to be begging for a DIY project, doesn't it?
A 3d printed case, a little SoC, perhaps a Raspberry Pi Zero, as the brains with asterisk and some additional open source software providing a web interface running on it.
I went the DIY route (you can find the details as a parent comment). But, I had good luck with voip.ms as a SIP provider. It is inexpensive at $1.10/month for the phone number and $0.008/min for calling. And it has a pretty good history of user forums, wiki, etc for debugging hints with various hardware.
TinCan owner here. The issue with landlines in my experience is that they quickly become overwhelmed with spam calls. That and the ability to lock down the phone to just a few numbers is the appeal.
Mine, in Spain, is surprisingly free of spam. I receive spam on my mobile phone, which is often blocked by Android, but I don't receive spam on my landline. Strange, isn't it?
There are still VoIP services that function essentially the same. I switched to that recently because the real POTS service had been jacked up in price a crazy amount, probably because we were grandfathered into even having it since the company website didn't even seem to offer it anymore.
Well, I'm sure my landline is not a landline anymore, I'm sure it is some sort of VoIP system, but it doesn't matter, it is a phone with a number, that doesn't leave the living room.
That's entirely pragmatic in this data collecting age. Being silent and hanging up as soon as you hear the spam won't get you marked as a phone line that has a human on the other end nor do you risk your voice being recorded. If you're silly enough to say your name when answering you'll just end up with text and email that is now personalised with your name (it's much faster to identify and hang up when their best intro is to say "hello who am i speaking to?" on a single person line click).
I don't know anyone in my age bracket (45) who doesn't do this let alone those younger. It's entirely understood and expected. Fuck anyone who says it's rude and those of an age particularly prone to falling for scams (70+ and 15under) should be encouraged to do this. You should be telling your kids "never say anything on picking up, let the caller to your phone identify themselves! They could be scammers trying to get your details such as your name".
I feel all these "OMG the kids don't say hello anymore they have no etiquette!!!" statements are either from the clueless or from spammers frustrated that it's much harder to get through if you don't know their name.
I never answer my land line with "Hello", because predictive dialers recognize that as a go signal for telemarketers. I usually answer my land line with my name, business style. Cell phone is answered with "Hi, ... " depending on who's calling.
> You should be telling your kids "never say anything on picking up, let the caller to your phone identify themselves! They could be scammers trying to get your details such as your name".
How does saying "hello" give scammers your details such as your name?
I think the op was maybe on a bit of a tear and misspoke, but the sentiment is correct. These days even saying hello can be used to make a decent voice clone with some reasonable (say 50%) chance that it is you (your phone number is linked to a ton of information). I would personally try to minimize my exposure to this risk even if it is somewhat paranoid.
The 'bloop' is a beep for the other person being dumped onto the call. Typically in a call center/contact center system like this, the agent's headset is always live. When the 'bloop' comes in, it's an audible cue for the agent to actually pick up themselves as their ringtone on the line. At the end of the call they hit 'release' and wait for the next 'bloop' to go live again.
Judge the tree by its fruits. Children are showing very real signs of addiction, and unlike known quantities like video games, or TV in past generations, parents are being pressured into handing children a device, usually completely or effectively without any safety controls, a private screen with which everyone in the world, every corporation, foreign country, friend or foe, can pour propaganda, toxicity, lies, porn, etc. directly into their brains. We should be careful with this.
Before the smartphone did all this, no one would have come out and campaigned to build a new kind of free library outside every middle school where all these things were advertised and made readily available to kids anonymously. We do have real libraries, but they don’t just automatically accept and push books donated by any random company, foreign country, or random pervert. Because that’s an insane thing to do.
The burden should have been on the “smartphones are good” people to prove that giving kids all that was worth the downsides, or to have shown how any supposed benefits could be had more safely, without requiring all parents to become experienced MDM admins, which they just won’t do.
It is actually amazing how far with a couple of tin cans, greaseproof paper taped around one end, and string attached to the paper. You are not going to do VOIP, but 50 yards is possible.
Even more OT:
One Xmas my Dad (unredeemable gadget freak, early adopter of the TRS80) gave me and my little bro two wired handsets with batteries and a ringer. We wired up brother's bedroom to living room, but soon realised our horrible mistake:
[ring, ring]
"Can I have a glass of water?"
[ring, ring]
"Can I have a glass of water?"
It lasted less than a day.
We also had a similar setup that did morse code, that was much less intrusive, not least because me and my little bro did not know morse, except for SOS.
You mirrored my kid communication tech experience, except mine was with my neighbor next door. My brother and I were 13 and 12 respectively. The neighbors were two girls: 14 and 12. Bedroom windows about 22 feet apart.
Our list of experiments included:
Written signs
Tin cans
Morse code circuit
Wired handset
Walkie-talkies
The fun lasted a couple years until puberty struck.
When I was 12 or so (might have been older)? I had convinced my parents to buy me a lantern battery (6v) and lots of wire. I connected all in series - two speakers and the battery connecting my room to my brother's room. Unfortunately only I could control which speaker was acting as a microphone (I had to swap the battery terminals the wires were connected.)
- take a phone, remove features, package with bright colors, profit (or VC then profit, maybe).
Sadly a lot of those aren't recycling old gadgets, they are just making new ones and block features, lock down in their own "store", etc. I think it's actually quite terrible.
Now the problem is that they're not "dumb" enough as they have a web browser, youtube etc, but that can be considered fine because the experience for those is so bad that it's unlikely to get addicting.
2. properly set smartphone which can be used as dumb phone with restricted contacts and no app install allowed, apps screen time limited to zero or heck even browser disabled in guest profile
3. kids smartwatch with parental controls which limit who they can call and who can call and message them, I'm just working on one of these and it's great even for seniors
If you don't like kid having wearable with them I have shocking news for you - you can leave all of the above at home!
Btw. kids nowadays don't really call each other, they text (IM) each other. And for the record I am one of those few parents who didn't give phone/tablet to their toddlers hands like majority of people do wheever they are (public transport, car, waiting room, etc.), my older elementary school kid has "dumb" phone (my old Symbian Nokia, but he use it only for calls/SMS anyway, though I will probably switch to restricted smartphone since it's inconvenient even for me not being able to send whatsapp message, battery is crap and classmates have whatsapp as well), my younger elementary school kid doesn't have anything, but when she goes outside alone she takes Motorola walkie talkie with roughly 0.5-1km range in city.
edit: related call scene from Fight Club how Tyler properly answers the phone (not answering but calling back and his first response is "Who is this?"):
Although the idea is lovely, I'm not going to encourage my kiddo to chat with his buddies on a service that can hoover up their imagination for later manipulation.
This is the ultimate "parents think it's great, kids will think it's lame" product. I mean, I like it. And just the name conjures images of GenXers yelling at clouds on TikTok about how they used to use tin cans or Solo cups connected with string to talk to their friends, so it's clear who they're targeting with the marketing. But if I were 11-13yo and I got this when all my friends got an iPhone? I'd be furious.
But I dunno. Kids being what they are, seem to be developing curiosity about "retro tech". So maybe there's some sort of whiplash effect occurring among them.
Yeah, I also pause when I read articles like this. The parent in this story is trying to go "full 90s", like that was when kids were raised the best... which just happens to be the time when they were kids. Except, when I was a kid in the 90s, the parents at that time thought the 90s things were horrible and longed for the best time to raise kids... which of course was when they were children.
1. Allowing the kids to call parents and no one else, without all the extra baggage that comes with a smartphone.
2. Multiple families getting together and deciding this is how their kids will communicate with each other (i.e. all agreeing not to get smartphones for their kids).
> But if I were 11-13yo and I got this when all my friends got an iPhone? I'd be furious.
If you've decided they're not getting a smartphone at that age, they'll be furious regardless. They may opt for this as an alternative. Up to the kids.
I read it as they were talking about the idea of having kids still go play with actual tin cans and a string in this day and age rather than it be something only old people could have done.
This is for kids who don't yet have a smart phone, not as a smart phone replacement for kids who already had smartphones. I made something similar for my kids(basically, a phone with buttons that can call a fixed set of people), and my kids love it, and use it multiple times per day.
> Probably the best thing is a CB radio. Let them talk to any other kids in town but no chance of weirdness.
No chance of weirdness? On CB? Have you used a CB?!?
I had a CB in my car for a while and the majority of the talk I ever heard on it outside of traffic updates and cop reports on major interstate highways was weird shit.
If the kid doesn't have a smartphone, and looks around and sees kids who do have one, they're gonna be envious and pissed when their parents tell them they can't have one. I know because it's analogous to what I felt when I was still slumming it with my TI-99/4A when every other kid had a NES back in the late 80s.
Pfft those suckers didn't have Parsec or Car Wars or Ms. Pac Man plus the hours spent typing TI-BASIC from a magazine was less frustrating than trying to get the jumps right on Super Mario Bros level 8-2. And I'm sure Demolition Division and Meteor Multiplication are why I ended up with a math degree.
For real though I spent so much time pining for Mario 3 before my parents finally did give in. But I feel like there was something good about the diversity, like when I could play Lode Runner on my buddy's C64 (actually a 128... GO 64)
A year ago, I got my 8 y/o a landline (we used Ooma). It has been absolutely wonderful.
By far the best thing is that he makes his own playdates. I'm not the middleman anymore. He just makes plans and asks me if it's ok. And if his friend doesn't have a landline, I let him call their parent. It surprises them, but when he leaves a message, they love it. He's definitely had more time with friends because of it.
Another funny thing was he complained about writing a thank you note, so we said "OK, the alternative is that you have to call them". He called them, had a nice conversation, and thanked them. Honestly, it was better than a thank you note.
It's been one of the best purchases we're made. I feel some hope this will delay the eventual begging for a smart phone because he's able to do the most critical thing, connect with friends.
I bought two office phones for 30 euros each (Yealink) and set up a VOIP plan with voip.ms for my 8 and 9 YO kids.
I recently got divorced, so there is a phone at each house in case they want to reach out to the other parent directly. Ex and I did not want the kids to feel their right to reach the other parent needed to ask for permission
Family has Softphone in their mobiles, so the full family is a speed dial away.
I also whitelist numbers they can dial out.
So far it’s working like a charm, they love it.
That’s beautiful and I respect your and your ex’s commitment to be good co-parents.
My 9 and 12 year old share a "kid" phone that's just a hand-me-down parent phone. This partially meets that need, but it still gets used for way too much unsupervised YouTube time.
The thing for me that has really unlocked voice-based socializing has been the 12 year old jumping on Discord with his buddies from school. I feel like this mirrors well how I myself chat with my adult male friends—it's rarely in the context of just "a call" but rather while doing another activity. So when I see him joking around with them while they play Minecraft or whatever, that feels like it's a reasonable pattern for how to sustain friendships.
You can always get them an old school payphone... https://payphone.com/Pay-Phone/Personal-Pay-Phone.html
My kid uses a shared Google doc to chat with friends on their school-issued Chromebooks. (But still has the problem of unsupervised screen time.)
Same! They have a thing called presentation city that is a slide deck that is a sort of ad hoc social media platform.
I have a strong belief we should experience most/all the levels of technology as we grow up to better appreciate our current state.
e.g. corded phone -> cordless phone -> mobile phone -> smartphone
or
records -> tape -> CD -> MP3 -> cloud
or
Atari -> NES -> SNES -> N64 -> Gamecube -> Wii -> Switch 2
My kids are grown up, but my mom is worried about her AT&T service switching to VOIP. She didn't understand my description of Ooma, which I've been using for many years, but now I'm thinking that I should just bring over all the needed hardware and just call it a landline.
Landlines work when there is no power, which depending on where you live can happen more or less often but an important feature for an elderly family member especially if they live alone.
For my situation, telling my mom her voip phone was a landline would be problematic.
I do need some solution though, AT&T technicians tell me copper thieves are disrupting her service regularly.
Landlines only work when there is no power if: - you use an old school landline phone (not cordless) - your landline is actually copper going to the house (I've seen fiber to house + conversion to twisted pair by a box with a battery) - upstream infrastructure either still has (possibly battery) power
If the isp doesn’t go down with the power outage you could probably get a big enough ups to keep the router and voip phone going for at least a couple of hours. Those things don’t use much power
I just setup a VOIP line at home and have it plugged into my UPS (along with my cable modem + network devices) to provide call service in the event of a power outage.
In a big black out live we had in Spain the infrastructure all goes down. I was the only with data because i had star link and batteries in the house. Not that I could call anyone in Spain though.
Formal thank you notes seem to have been going out of fashion, I actually like that tradition, thank you for keeping it going.
Do we think a dumb phone Nokia and calls only SIM is just as good (to avoid all the drilling etc. of installing landlines in each kids room?)
I dug out an old Motofone (the $40 eink candybar) for this reason, only to discover that it’s 2G, which has been decommissioned. Too bad, would’ve been fun to watch the kid learn T9.
Modern dumbphones exist: https://www.hmd.com/en_int/nokia-3210
For Americans, QVC and Target regularly have the BLU Flex or TCL Flip 3 bundled with a year of Tracfone service for $50 or less.
Of course they do. But this is HN - not as neat as using the 15-year-old phone I have.
I mean, sure you can find them if you look hard enough, but a phone that plays videos is not a dumbphone in my book. And I wouldn't hand it to my kid. It's probably worse than handing them a smartphone, because I'm guessing it is just dumb enough to have no parental controls.
Nokia 105 has 4G version.
You can buy a new feature phone with 4G for peanuts.
2G to 3G converter ftw!
Is there such a thing? Given it's radio waves in regulated radio spectrum, I'm not sure such a device would even be allowed to operate without a license. This said, there are 3G Nokia dumbphones (e.g. C2-01). I just had to stop using one because my operator tore down the 3G network here, like in most of Europe. (2G was already down since some time).
Edit: there are even 4G-VoLTE dumbphones by the way.
Ooma has a wifi box that you plug your handset into. It's not like a POTS where you need to put a jack in every room.
I believe cordless VoIP phones are still a product one can purchase new.
They need only an electrical outlet for the charge stand.
Make me really want to build one for my son when he gets to that age.
If I build it, I can control the full feature set and explain to him how it worked and he'll get the 'cool' factor too. With the raspberry pi I have lying around at home, it doesn't sound impossible!
It is really straightforward with some cheap hardware and patience. I have another comment on this thread with more breadcrumbs but I used a Fanvil "hotel phone" and voip.ms. Under $50 and an afternoon all in and you have full control.
This is a good idea. I need to start getting phone numbers from people.
Why does it seem like many parents are unaware that a hand me down iPhone can be heavily locked down with screen time settings? A list of things you can do:
- allowed list of apps, can reduce it to just phone, imessage, and utilities like weather app
- effectively permanent downtime, just set the end time less than start time such as 3:00 am to 2:59 am (technically 1 minute of non downtime). This blocks apps except for the allowed apps
- disable installing apps from app store
- disable adding new contacts and block calls and messages not in contact list. This allows parent to control who the phone can be used to contact
- none of these settings can be changed without the screen time pin
- also configure the phone with a minor apple account and add to your family group so you can monitor and control screen time settings from your phone.
So start with a super locked down phone that can only be used to communicate with parents. This is very helpful when they start after school sports. And the phone is so locked down they don't really have any interest in it.
Later when they're older start allowing communication with friends from school. But still only phone and imessage, no other apps. This reinforces that it's a communication device, not for endless scrolling and watching videos.
All of this is work, more work, admin work, things I would pay an assistant to do. Why would I want to be a system administrator when I can just not give my children systems that I need to administer?
This type of solution provides a simple system that requires very little administration and supervision. The problem with modern communications tech as it relates to children is that by default these systems provide access to every adult on planet earth to your child's inbox. That is not a feature that I need, but rather is a crippling design flaw much more likely to harm my kids than it is to help them.
As a parent, two reasons:
1. The admin work of parental controls in Apple is non-trivial and obscure. I would guess there are something like 300 different knobs and settings you can control for each kid individually. The UX is terrible and there are features missing that seem extremely basic and fundamental. For example, I can't see how much time left my kids currently have, nor can I block any app "now".
2. "the phone is so locked down they don't really have any interest in it." This has not been my experience at all. My kids know that less-locked-down devices exist and frequently complain about the restrictions.
Indeed, there's an additional problem as well. There are settings, and then there are settings that allow one to change the settings. Not only are there hundreds of settings but they are duplicated in this way.
Configuring them from scratch is a minimum 20 minute job, and then you need to double and triple check to avoid mistakes. More like a half hour.
Same exact reason 90% of people don’t use the Shortcuts app. This stuff is obvious for you and me, but tedious and painful for everyone else, and it’s still easy to miss one thing that leaves it easy to circumvent. There are people whose full time job is managing MDM in IT departments, and it’s not just because of the number of devices they manage. It’s because this stuff is complicated. And that’s for grownups, whose judgment is expected to be better than 12-year-olds, and who can be fired.
Also Screen Time is a little better in a few ways than what Android offers, but it’s still a joke, is incredibly Byzantine, and limits your options as a parent.
Hello! Parent that's fully aware of this. My son has access to a landline and it solves the problem of tech as a tool vs a past time. If he thinks of his friend, he calls, friends reach out etc. No scrolling for something to do. I see my phone usage and am constantly trying to introduce friction into it. This is an extension of that concept.
Apple makes this a huge PITA, along with having to do a significant amount of it from another apple device.
I'm glad we ditched iPads, it sucked.
This has to be intentional.
Drug dealer getting the kids hooked early is priority #1.
Give just enough "parental control" to lure parents in.
Make it just annoying enough that the parents eventually give up and the kid is the one pushing the drug the entire time.
Because it’s a lot easier to refuse to buy an expensive gadget for your kids than to refuse to press a few buttons to set them free.
Our kid breaks through the screen time regularly, even with new passcodes. Have a theory it is done from the wife's macbook, but not entirely sure. Gave up; would not recommend or use again.
Best (for older kids) would be a dumb cell phone like we had in the 2000s. Good for phone calls, texting, and simple offline apps like casual games, camera and music player. Maybe email. Definitely no web browser, youtube, or social media crap.
I don't know the extent to which such devices are still manufactured today.
There are: https://www.hmd.com/en_int/nokia-3210
(and it's not the only one, also check KaiOS phones)
Parents are aware. This is a horrible solution.
What's going to happen immediately is that kids with equivalent phones will compare, realize that one has a lot of restrictions and the other doesn't, and it becomes a nightmare. They know that all you need to do is unlock it for them.
It's the same mental distinction between "For $200 we'll install rear seat warmers in your Tesla" and "For $200 we'll 'unlock' the already-present rear seat warmers" (that's the only hardware unlock I've ever paid for and I'm still bitter 7 years later).
> What's going to happen immediately is that kids with equivalent phones will compare, realize that one has a lot of restrictions and the other doesn't, and it becomes a nightmare. They know that all you need to do is unlock it for them.
Don't you think they will as easily realize their newly purchased TinCan is far more restricted than the 10 year old phone theirs friends received from their parents/siblings?
It's not restricted. It's less capable. Entirely different thing. And they'll view it as a completely different device for different purpose (voice calls vs. doom scrolling).
Specifically designed to be less capable is the same as being restricted. It's purpose is explicitly to restrict the user communication to some predefined setting by a third party (the parent and company behind it) and the user is well aware of that, as this e-waste cost as much as a cheap or second hand smartphone.
It's not "restricted", it's designed to serve a different purpose. A bicycle is not a "restricted" car.
The jukebox I got for my basement is not a restricted Spotify-enabled smart speaker. It's a different device that does something different.
First, you got it for yourself, so you chose to use a jukebox (or in other words : restrict your listening to specific titles on physical media) instead to impose it to other, which make a big difference in what people see as a restrictions(instead of a choice, which is self inflicted).
Chosing a Tin Can is obviously to restrict your kid usage of communication, it's the nature of the purchase of the device.
First of all, comparing a locked-down smartphone with a fully capable smartphone is different from comparing a smartphone with a 'landline phone'. That's like apples to apples compared to apples to oranges.
Secondly as far as I understand, you need the same type of phone at both ends to communicate with each other. Looks like the tin-can and other similar devices are designed to talk only to each other. While that is a restriction, it eliminates the avenue for a comparison. The friends are all on equal ground.
Thirdly, you're talking as if parental controls, especially unequal parental controls are a bad thing. Parental controls aren't like government or corporate restrictions. There is a necessary assumption that parents act in the best interests of the kids, unlike the other two.
Some parents are irresponsible and may allow their kids to consume alcohol or drugs. Will you allow your kids to do it too, because it may end up in comparisons? You have to talk to your kids about why that is a bad idea. It's wrong to assume that kids won't listen at all. Don't most kids refrain from drinking, smoking and driving till they come of age?
If this sort of control seems unfair or unethical to you, you're basically exposing your kids to serious dangers. And brain rot is a very serious problem that HN doesn't talk enough about. It ruins even the seniors. But for kids, it wreaks havoc with their IQ and personality.
Choosing a Tin Can for a child that doesn't have a phone isn't restricting them, it's empowering them with a new form of communication to chat to their friends. Getting my 10 year old a bicycle instead of a car isn't a restriction.
It's no use having an argument with thig guy. He simply has a more modern* definition of what "restricted" means.
*I don't know what to call it. It's like those people that buy a car with heated seats locked down by subscription and calling it "a feature" because some cars don't have them at all.
Compared to getting them nothing, yes. But the OP's point is that this doesn't prevent the child from mentally comparing themselves to peers that have a smartphone, and viewing their Tin Can as a "restriction" imposed by their parents.
Which it is. I don't understand the need to wink-wink-nudge-nudge pretend it's anything else by the others in this thread. Just own it, restrictions aren't bad by default.
That's why I'm thinking of getting my kid (who doesn't have a phone yet) a Unihertz Jelly Star.
https://www.unihertz.com/fr-fr/products/jelly-star
- Because it's small, it doesn't look like a regular smartphone
- The small size would make it impractical for social media/scrolling/videos even if I were to unlock it
...but compared to a dumbphone, I can still allow Spotify and their school management software so they can access their schedule and homework
That looks very ugly. Any kid above the age of 12 would reject that.
Nightmare? Maybe you need to work on telling your children no.
Instead of being bitter for 7 years perhaps you should not have purchased such an absurd thing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
I did that for my kid when he was 10 or so. He had it "hacked" before I knew it. If he had done it himself, I would have been proud, but some other kid did it. Never even tried after that. He's 17 now, he's fine.
I think we are except Apple lockdown experience for this is total shit show, not only you need to spend so much time but also if you need to change something (at least for me) it just reset all the previous options, because I turned it off to manually install something that was locked down
I have a device setup like this but I hate it, it’s possibly the worst UX I’ve used from Apple.
I don’t think people are buying this fun novelty landline phone because they haven’t heard of parental controls
As another commenter said, the problem with parental controls on a smartphone is your kid constantly nagging you to approve installation of one more app, or extend their daily limit "just for today" (again).
With a device that's not a smartphone, you don't have this problem.
How do I lock down the iPhone so it works only at home?
Never put a SIM in it?
I mean, a landline + phone is way cheaper to be fair
Or a MagicJack
For some people like me, iOS parental controls are utterly and completely broken. I have tried to make it work over three or four years and just as many iOS releases - no dice.
About a dozen times in those years, the system silently failed open either completely or partially (eg. some restrictions still applied, but whitelists in Safari were no longer enforced, the app store was suddenly accessible again or time limits were no longer in place). Not once was there any indication on the parent device.
Several times, the only way to reenable broken restrictions was to wipe the device, because changes to parental controls simply stopped syncing.
Here's long-time Mac developer and blogger Michael Tsai describing the same thing: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/09/24/screen-time-brokenness/
The opposite is also true: Apple’s parental controls fail closed in inscrutable and impossible to debug ways. Yesterday, in order to share an iPad’s location with my iPhone, I had to totally disable managing Screen Time on the device. Every time I would click “share with <my name>”, the damn thing would tell me “Location settings can’t be updated right now, try again later”. No other combination of “solutions” on the Apple support forum, the random blogspam links, or the oh-so-helpful search-AI-summary thing even made a dent. I suspect something in the underlying data model was out of sync with the UI or something. Incredibly frustrating experience from the “it just works” vendor.
Yep. After years of frustration, trying every possible way to fix it, uncountable hours of searching, I asked Claude about it: "just subscribe to an external service". This is ridiculous, Android's parental controls work flawlessly. If I knew that beforehand, I would never had got my kid an iOS device.
Off-topic, but I hate sites like this. All links in the article are for other pages on businessinsider.com, but there's no link to Tin Can, not that I can find at least.
It's getting more and more normal that sites won't link out of their own "property".
Especially weird in this case since it’s such an over the top case of Submarine Marketing.
Submarine marketing?
https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Yeah, and that's especially egregious when they're presenting a product, or a scientific result without linking to it.
I was thinking of doing something like this for text with LoRa. But, having kids I don't have time to do that. This seems really great!
I read the previous discussion, oof:
S04dKHzrKT wrote
Make note of the privacy policy[1]. Some users may not like the data they collect. > Information Collected from Children: As detailed in Section 3.C, we collect voice audio during calls, call log information, and utilize the Parent-provided contact list in relation to the Child's use of the Tin Can Device. We may also collect device identifiers and technical usage data related to the Service.
[1]: https://tincan.kids/policies/privacy-policy
Also note that if you buy a Tin Can unit, there's a noncompete clause: You agree not to "build, benchmark, or develop a competing product or service." So don't buy this if you work for a telco, or a voice communications service of any kind.
This is laughably unenforceable, and all the more ridiculous for it.
If a company puts unenforceable terms in their TOS, how likely are they to comply with the law in every other matter? No way would I give my kid a device made by these people for that reason.
Fair point, and totally agreed.
I literally LOLed at the idea that purchasing a consumer product, at retail, could include stipulations on my future employment. And at the hubris of any manufacturer for imagining they could get away with such an absurd idea.
Oh no, how dare I checks stand up a VoIP ATA and plug a phone into it. I'll be waiting to hear from their legal team.
This text does not appear in the link. I do see:
>Call Logs: We collect information about calls made using Phones, including the phone numbers you call or receive calls from, the date/time of the calls, and the length of the calls. We also collect network quality metrics and other technical data related to call performance. Please note that we do not record calls.
The version of the privacy policy cited in the previous discussion cited that voice audio is collected for the purposes of forwarding it to the other phone.
In addition to collecting all the metadata they also collect the voices of children recorded in voicemails.
Their policy says that the information they collect is used to "Send you marketing communications (see the section below for information about how to opt out of these communications at any time)" and to "Monitor and analyze trends, usage, and activities in connection with our Phones and Services, including to generate de-identified, anonymized, or aggregated data" and to "Target advertisements to you on third-party platforms and websites (for more information and to opt out, see the Targeted Advertising and Analytics section below)"
Remember that "de-identified" and "anonymized" is a lie. De-identified data can be re-identified, and anonymized data can be de-anonymized. Often trivially. There are even situations where individuals can be identified from aggregated data.
It would be better if they specifically excluded advertising uses of call metadata, etc. I assume this is getting mixed in from their ecommerce efforts to sell the devices. But how do you expect them to play back the voicemail if they don’t have it? What would be the point of "please leave a message after the beep" if the audio is going to /dev/null?
If it's a landline it could store the voicemail on device, which is how phones used to work (or prior to that, you'd plug an answering machine into the phone). A GB of flash would be basically unlimited and cost a couple cents. You could play an old school "your call could not be completed as dialed" message if it's actually unavailable due to a power/network outage or something.
That privacy policy doesn't sound out of the norm for any telco, which will be subjected to laws that require https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawful_interception
It'd be extremely out of the norm for telco companies. Tin Can uses the calls and voicemails to collect data on children and sell that to others. That has zero to do with lawful interception. The moment Tin Can becomes popular enough you can bet that the government will be snooping those calls too
It would be pretty spooky if your voice managed to come out the other party's telephone without ever having been collected into and processed by the telephone network. Taking audio from one place and transporting it to another is what we pay it for.
Have you seen some of the Meshtastic hardware with built-in keyboards? https://meshtastic.org/docs/hardware/devices/lilygo/tdeck/
I was thinking something like an esp32 + mesthastic / LoRa + REST API on the LAN, discoverable via multi cast. The "landline" is a tablet or phone with an app that talks to the esp32. Separately, a parent with the app does the Diffie-Hellman key exchange over SMS, NFC, or some other channel with the friends who also have the app, and you know their identity. The phone app updates the device with the friend's keys, they do the same thing on their end, and voila you're in business. The kids can talk securely, you can read that the kids say via the LAN, no goddamned third parties.
You just reinvented the IM-ME, a device famous for being used aftermarket to hack garage doors (in the days before Flipper Zero).
Lol. That's cool, I've never heard of that!
My six year old is a big Meshtastic fan.
I don’t know when that previous comment is from but the text it quotes is not in the linked privacy policy
It must have changed in the last 8 months
Funny enough, China already ran this experiment. Kids' smartwatches started as call-only devices for safety. Then they added friend lists, status updates, like counts, popularity rankings. Little Genius now has 48% of the global kids' smartwatch market [1]. Kids delete real-life friends for not having enough likes on the watch. Once a device enters a kid's social life, there's no market incentive to keep it simple.
[1] https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3328227/move-o...
>Then they added friend lists, status updates, like counts, popularity rankings.
That sounds absolutely horrible.
Why?
> Kids delete real-life friends for not having enough likes on the watch.
I "made" something like this 7-8 years ago for our first kid. When I say "made" I mean I bought a "fixed wireless terminal" for $40 on eBay, a classic landline phone for $30, and a cell phone subscription for kids ($5/month). Then I connected the parts, and voila, we had a landline for kids.
Obvious benefits include low cost, full interop with all other phones, and having the kids learn our phone numbers by heart after punching them many times.
I made something using a VOIP phone and voip.ms. What provider has a $5/mo kids cell subscription!?
voip.ms is about $1.30/mo with the cost of the phone number (DID) and "minutes".
I have some more breadcrumbs on this thread if you are interested in details on my setup too.
Regarding minutes, how many minutes? My kids basically hog my VoIP "landline" talking to their cousins 50% of the time they're home. (They're actually playing games together and using the phone as voice chat). I've been thinking of trying to get a second line for them to hog but didn't want anything with limited minutes.
It is pay as you go $0.008/min
https://voip.ms/pricing
My cellphone provider offers a limited kids cell subscription. Things like "can only call 5 different pre-approved numbers, no data traffic". I think the business model is that after a period of time, people bump into the limitations and upgrade to the $10/mo version.
Thanks for sharing the "fixed wireless terminal" tip. A HN post a while ago describe hacking a landline to a wireless terminal. But this tip removes the hacking :)
I built a DIY system like this using Asterisk, Raspberry Pi, and a Grandstream ATA: https://github.com/cancio/rotary
I based it on the instructions provided by this Show HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39801991
We bought a Tincan after a company parent-erg conversation led to a coworker discussing her experience with the product.
Is it the game changer we thought it would be? No. We thought my daughter would want to call her friends as much as she wants us to call their friends' parents to have them come over. We thought my son would use it as much as he texts on his gizmo.
Having said this, they are getting experience, albeit infrequent, with saying "Hello.... I love you. Goodbye."
And, yeah, when it rings, there is a mad-dash to pick it up. There is something uniquely pre cell phone ("reminds me of the 80s") about the joy and wonder of "Who could be calling me (at this hour)?"
> She said she heard about the Tin Can on a Facebook group.
Nice to safe the kids from that... But who will save the adults? ^^
Yes, social media is bad for kids. You start to realize that. It only took 15 years. The thing is: It's equally bad for you...
And you prove that every minute. Whenever you say something, and after three sentences, basically every topic ends up in something related to Instatoktube.
My only hope is that what we are currently see rising is similar to what happened to alcoholism and chain smoking.
It's not "equally" bad for adults.
Just like alcohol and tobacco, it's bad for adults but way worse for kids.
It's way way worse for kids especially adolescents
I'm a happy Tin Can customer. For young children (5 and 7 in my case) it's especially delightful to give them a measure of autonomy, at an age where they don't yet have a mobile phone. They get to call their friends and family on their own terms, without any safety or "screen time" concerns.
It's especially fun to watch them discover the very concept of a landline: the keypad (they thought it was a pin code); the dial tone; the memorizing and writing down of phone numbers.
5/5 highly recommended.
Another comment claims they record calls.
Big yikes.
Big yikes is an understatement.
I would rather just have an old iPad and trust my child to use it responsibly.
Overall I think that while the Zoomers are doomed, because they grew up in the height of social media frenzy, generation alpha put two and two together and collectively noticed that screen time = no attention from parents. Some are okay with that, but others, like my kid prefer having attention above all.
This concept has been amazing for my family and kids.
Shameless plug: I started my own service without vendor hardware lock in.
https://chatterboxphone.com
Oh nice! I have been working on my own too! (https://havenphone.com). I was planning on the exact same model and pricing as well.
I am curious: have you gone down the tr069 rabbit hole? If not how do you plan to do endpoint management?
Are you using a Fanvil H2W? Too? That was my first phone choice.
I also learned of https://www.beanstalk.club from this thread as well. Looks like there are a few folks trying to do similar services without the proprietary hardware and waitlists.
I’ll send you a message to your support account :-)
No vendor or hardware lock-in is key. Can you give insight into the costs that inform the monthly rate? Emergency services / telephone network?
Sure thing! Behind every "unlimited" plan out there, there is a per minute rate that small carriers like us have to pay in order to get access to the regular phone network and connect to any phone number in the world. On top of that, there's a monthly cost per phone number, per E911 address registration, per voice channel, etc. Then, you have the ever popular "taxes and fees", which can vary based on the user's location and can become complex very quickly. Not to mention FCC registration fees and taxes. Then there's the cost of the server infrastructure to register the phones and keep them online. And finally - STIR/SHAKEN implementation has a cost of registration and verification as well.
I just watched this great mini-documentary about a local landline system in Bellingham WA. Well worth a couple of minutes.
https://youtu.be/UhVi3smmvTs?si=ow6zw_xTKo22WpLZ
People can call each other but also businesses have 4-digit phone numbers that are shortened versions of the business name, like GUIT for the guitar shop.
How lovely and so very Bellingham-esque! $5/mo and looks like it can be used outside Bham.
https://telehamster.net/node/7
I hope these guys do well or more local options keep on popping up.
"If parents consent [...] we collect [...] serial number and battery level [...] who called and call time and length [...] and Voicemails (messages and greetings)"
If you're going to get this product, make sure you pay attention when you set it up, and opt out if you are privacy minded.
We got one of these for our elementary-aged kids because it took off in our network of families at their school.
It’s so fun watching them talk to their buddies from school, planning play dates, just chitchatting etc. My favorite thing is when they prank call one another, cracks me up.
Maybe the novelty wears off soon but for at least the last month or so they’ve used it every day. It feels like it gives them a bit of autonomy they’re seeking right now at their ages, but in a relatively safe way.
Highly recommend it.
Fun product, but not for me. We've given the kids old iPhones when they reached the age of 12 and they have been known we can check anything and everything on their phone. Each and every email is cc'ed to us and we log what we can (not that we actually do that much).
We have also told the kids we are not 24/7 actively monitoring them, because we woud like to trust them. Unless we think there's an issue they cannot, will not or are forced not to tell us, we will not intervene with their phone usually. They know we can track their phones anywhere on this planet and they don't care, because we are not acting as helicopter parents.
This has built trust between our kids and us parents. It forces us as parents to start trusting the kids and the kids get the freedom they want and need.
Is it 100% perfect? No, not by a long shot. It's a balance that may be scary for parents. We talk with them about stuff like doomscrolling, social media drama and privacy. They show us memes, tell us about their school life and usually do not care if we happen to see some private conversation on the corner of our eye.
Do the kids make mistakes? You bet. That's part of their life. Do we as parents make mistakes? Absolutely. None of the kids came with a manual. :)
Discussion (197 points, 8 months ago, 132 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44587018
Thanks for linking to it. Folks, before you rush to offer your genius ACKSHUALLY ideas about how Google Voice will let you do "the same thing as Tin Can for free", please, please, think about what GV does and, more importantly, does not (Hint: Whitelist).
Can you even attach a POTS or POTS like device to Google Voice anymore? I was looking into this last month and it seemed like they had removed that feature and the devices people were using (they had stopped selling them some years ago) to do it stopped working recently.
I have an Ooma phone now and I just plugged my existing phones into the Ooma box which then works the same as an old landline for the most part.
Just put a Google Voice line behind a FreePBX or Asterisk and you get all the call filtering you want. You can even make your internal numbers or whatever.
I first found the Tin Can cool, but now seeing their privacy policy, it's definitely nothing for me. I'd just use a normal VoIP cordless phone (e.g. Gigaset makes various models), or even a normal corded phone with a VoIP ATA. Some of them might even have integrated whitelisting, but I didn't check.
> Alarmingly, some Gen Zers don't say "hello" when they answer a phone call; they expect the caller to just start talking.
I'm an older Gen-X and I've stopped doing this unless I recognize the caller. I'm not going to give a scammer anything to build a voice print on. I also use the stock greeting for voicemail instead of a personal one.
Y-Zer myself and I do the same thing. I never initiate the communication when called unless I am expecting it or I know who the caller is. Otherwise, they'll know when someone picked up because their side will stop ringing, and they'll only get awkward silence until they start talking. Often times it's an automated voice system that will not begin until prompted by the callee, so it hits a timeout and hangs up.
The number of calls I get where it's either dead silence in the other end or clearly a call center based on the noise can only be categorized as "too much".
Also most spam calls seem to just hang up when a call connects to silence.
I had two silent, barring some office appliance noises, voicemails just today.
The number was on a spam list, but somehow managed to leave a "message".
The most surprising thing is that it was obviously a person calling and not a bot, as I was hearing the rustle of something (mouse?) being moved over a desk.
Yes, people think this behaviour came out of nowhere. It’s because if you are younger, phone calls are not the default (only two friends ever call me) and overwhelmingly are scammers or salespeople.
also X, also using generic vm, but thinking of switching to recording of fax machine max volume
I've been actively trying to think of a better way to answer the phone without sounding rude. but without giving up my name or mentally accepting whoever is on the other side (like hello tends to do)
I normally don't answer calls I don't recognize the number to, but if I might be expecting a call and have an inkling it might even possibly be spam, I just answer with a short 'ya?'
Slightly rude, but saying nothing at all is just bizarre to me.
Edit to add: One thing I've done for the last decade or so is use a number from an area code I don't live in. Most of my spam calls come from the same area code, so if I see that I know it's spam or a wrong number.
I clear my throat. Do it loud enough that the other end can tell someone is on the line, so they'll know to start the conversation. It isn't a rude "WHAT" type answer, but it doesn't directly acknowledge the caller, and is not inviting a conversation. Its a common enough act that it's not suspicious nor weird to hear during a conversation, and therefore its not off-putting if extended family or clients called from an unknown number.
It doesn't share my voice (for fingerprinting, demographic leak, etc, smh).
Also works as a bot filter - Humans tend to start with a "hello..?" because they're not sure anyone is there, while robots use the non-zero audio as a signal to start talking with full confidence.
Answer it as if somebody had knocked on your front door: "who is it?"
> mentally accepting whoever is on the other side (like hello tends to do)
I don’t get that. How is answering the phone mentally accepting the caller? What does it even mean to mentally accept? Is it that you don’t want to talk? Then let it go to voicemail and decide if you want to call back or not? I think I’m missing the point.
Same here (xennial), it confuses lot of telemarketers out of their script, if someone start talking with me I ask them "do I have contract with you?", if the answer is "no", I hang up, since it's clearly someone selling something.
related call scene from Fight Club how Tyler properly answers the phone (not answering but calling back and his first response is "Who is this?"):
https://youtu.be/tlw677Une_Q?si=xj3Sce9RdQ-_UfZP&t=85
> playdate
When I was a boy, there was no such word "playdate". What I'd do is just walk or ride my bike to a friend's house and knock on the door.
No parents involved.
For the nerdy who might want to set up their own similar system for their kids, and let their kids pick any landline phone they want, you can get an ATA (Analog Telephone Adapter) on eBay for cheap, then connect it to a Raspberry Pi with Asterisk, and any VOIP provider, to make your own PBX. (https://www.littlebytesofpi.com/raspberrypihomephone/)
Can I use Google Voice as the VOIP provider? I read that article and couldn't tell if Voice is used in addition to another VOIP service, like Ooma.
It blows my mind that the current Cisco ATA is $150+.
For the service I am building (havenphone.com) I used Grandstream HT801 with success with voip.ms. I don't love how easy their cloud can take over the device though.
There are much older ATAs on eBay for ~$20, they still work fine, since POTS and SIP don't change
I'm not sure if they're still available, but the PAP2T was a wonderful piece of kit - just an ethernet port and 2x RJ-45 jacks for old style phones. You can set up custom dial plans and use any VOIP SIP provider you like. You can trivially edit the dial plan to restrict certain number prefixes, and set up custom short numbers - so for instance my "landline" had 81 for my mum, 82 for brother, 83 for sister, etc. but you could also just dial regular numbers.
If you run an asterisk server on your own box, you could easily set up a private SIP network just for you and your kids, or your kids and their friends, etc. and either run a SIP client on your mobile for your use and a VOIP SIP gateway if you want your kid to be able to call a friend's mobile.
EDIT: I just looked and the PAP2T has been discontinued, but there seem to be lots of units available new from China that look identical and are sold as Linksys PAP2T, and some unbranded units that look the same but with blank labels. I've no idea if these are fully compatible with the real PAP2T, but they might still be worth trying.
Grandstream currently has a line of Analog Telephone Adapters (ATA)[1] that fit this use case.
[1]: https://www.grandstream.com/products/gateways-and-atas/analo...
I did this but using Twilio, a Grandstream HT802v2, and a basic AT&T wall phone. Caller ID sorta works. I really tried to find a phone that would make a satisfying sound when slammed down, but I found that no one makes good, solid corded wallphones any longer.
The toughest part was figuring out which set of wires (my house had like 5 lines somehow) went to that particular jack in the kitchen.
When I was a kid I remember discovering the heft of the home phone came from a big chunk of metal screwed into the plastic case.
(My family moved to cell phones so I got the opportunity to disassemble the old phone.)
Maybe just find some washers and glue them inside your handset and receiver?
If you live in Germany and have a Fritz!Box router, you can just buy a second old-ish Fritz!Box and a simple landline phone (from the likes of eBay, Kleinanzeigen...) and hook them up via WiFi.
Voilà, telephone service as it used to be. No proprietary payphone with questionable ToS and privacy policies needed.
Why does one need the second (old-ish) Fritz!Box? Doesn't the first one already have DECT?
Also, does this not require a landline number?
I'm glad it's a push-button phone, and not a rotary phone. There's a hilarious YouTube of today's teenagers tasked with making a phone call on a rotary phone:
The interface on a rotary phone isn't self-explanatory.Just got our Tin Can a few weeks ago. The hardware is "eh", but the service is pretty great. The ability to approve incoming/outgoing numbers before being able to call/receive calls is very handy to cut out any spam calls that you'd get with a normal land line.
The one on their website is now $100, not $75 as per the article.
Surely someone can build a more privacy-friendly decentralized solution?
It doesn't take much for Tin Can to start charging $50 / month for a subscription.
I think it is mostly a supply/demand issue. Most of their models are sold out, so they are trying to raise prices so that only those who really, really want/need one gets one. I think that they simply just mispriced the product initially. Soon enough there will probably be more competition that will help drive down the price.
I am working on a similar project. I have something working for my own needs and a few other families already but a long road to go before making something GA.
You can waitlist at https://havenphone.com if you are interested.
There were three major things I wanted to do differently from Tin Can:
- I wanted to use off the shelf VOIP hardware so if the company ever went out of business I (and any of my users) had an escape valve or could just sell the hardware.
- I wanted to have a code base I could open source. (not open source, yet!)
- I wanted flexibility to offer ATAs (devices that let you connect any ol' "analog" phone)- some of my parent friends wanted cordless "DACT" phones, interestingly.
It has been quite an adventure entering the world of VOIP.
The SIP protocol has so many esoteric options (understandably given its history!) it could make TLS look simple.
My most recent learning is this crazy protocol called TR-069 that ISPs use to configure endpoint hardware like home routers, cable modems, and VOIP phones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TR-069
Also, interestingly every cheap (sub-$50) phone and ATA I have tried has a built-in OpenVPN clients.
Oh, and one more interesting thing Grandstream ATAs are able to be taken over by the Grandstream cloud service by just providing the ATA serial number and mac address on the back of the device- I did not love that workflow when considering long-term security. (:
If you have $50 and some time to kill you can do it all yourself right now. In voip.ms you can use the phone book and the caller id filter to create a "*" hang-up rule and an "allow phone book" rule.
- https://major.io/p/85-cents-home-phone/
- https://www.voipsupply.com/fanvil-h3w-wifi-hotel-ip-phone-wh...
- https://www.voipsupply.com/fanvil-h2u-black-hotel-phone-v2
- https://www.voipsupply.com/grandstream-ht801-v2-ata
Seems like there are a bunch of alternatives popping up including some DIY solutions. Which is really awesome in this space. Check out https://www.beanstalk.club/ I've done some work with these folks. I love their bring-your-own-phone approach. There are so many cool old-school phones out there, even on ebay. We've also seen lots of success with Beanstalk and a simple $20 cordless phone. Kids love wandering around chit-chatting. There's also a ton of momentum around the https://www.waituntil8th.org/ pledge.
We actually have one of these between our group of friends and their kids and it's awesome. The kids call each other to chat and setup play dates or to go run around in the street. Our kids will call back home to let us know they made it to the other persons house, or let us know they're coming back home too.
The tactility is incredible, and it's so just so cute to watch them chat away (5 year olds!)
Did this exact thing for my four and six-year-old kids. I used an Ooma Telo Air[1] (Free + ~$6/mo in taxes and fees) and an old vTech landline phone. It's been highly successful in our house. The kids have (monitored) independence to call grandparents and aunts/uncles. Watching them translate written down 10-digit phone numbers into button presses is fun too.
1. https://www.ooma.com/home-phone-service/basic/
For three or four endpoints all within the home, you could do this with just ATAs and not even need a SIP server. Many ATAs have a configurable "dial plan" that will let you map a number to an IP address, thus giving you the ability to call the other terminals directly within the LAN.
Do you have an ATA you like? They are all janky in different ways in my experience.
We have a voip system for the house, mainly because its one floor too tall to shout up and easily be heard.
Each of the kids has a really old cisco voip phone (I got 8 for £35).
There is a quick dial menu which connects too the loft, kid1, kid2, shed, living room. I also have an extension for my mobile.
That works for keeping everyone in touch and save a lot of "WHAT DID YOU SAY?".
I got two DECT cordless phones for my house and tried to set up RustPBX on a raspberry pi. But I got snagged because it wasn’t playing nicely with flowroute, and I didn’t want to burden the project with my complaint. I guess I’ll end up using FreePBX but it sucks because RustPBX really looked promising.
Check out FusionPBX or FreeSWITCH. Great options, I like them better than anything Asterisk based right now.
Wonderful idea. The kid can call their friend "Let's meet outside". Then they go outside and (must) leave the phone at home. They use the phone to organize no-phone time together. Might be good for adults too.
For instance my boss couldn't call me while I'm out and about. What you expect me to carry my landline with me?
I know somebody that’s been landline-only since the 70s and only recently got a cell phone that’s strictly used for one specific unavoidable 2FA thing. One of the happiest and most professionally accomplished people I know.
I like the idea. We tried with licence free walkie talkies, but it did not catch on. What it worked is the xplora watches. Only approved contacts and we can also contact our kids and check GPS position . They are a bit buggy sometimes but mostly fine
Yeah I've seen some parents use this to great success. Seems to also allow them more freedom to allow kids to explore a bit more on their own. Like it's the 90's.
This is a nice idea, because it physically limits the place the child can call from. Even a very under-powered phone sets them free.
However, a new severely under-powered phone with no graphics or apps would probably meet the requirements of not being sucked into the grown-up world too early, and the kids can maintain their own contact lists.
And they'll grow super-fast thumbs like we had to in order to text :)
They cost about $50 but are still 4G.
Have you found a under powered phone that lets you lock down the Phone's incoming to an allow list?
That is the thing me (and most parent friends) want: freedom from spam calls and potential strangers.
Got inspired by this and setup voip.ms and a grand stream for this. Just a “landline” and the monthly costs way lower and you don’t have to use the crappy tin can phone.
> There's also a free plan where Tin Can users can call only other Tin Can users.
So you have to pay a monthly subscription for this, in addition to $75 for each phone, if you want to talk with anyone outside of their walled garden?
A monthly fee for a phone service sounds pretty normal to me?
In the age of FT audio calls and such, it seems out of place. I get paying for the hardware, and even a bit of a premium because the UI has so many parental controls. But charging a monthly fee seems surprising since the differentiation versus FT/GV/etc. is on the UI side, not the "you can talk to your friends" side. There is no monthly cost to a UI.
FT audio calls are in the same boat where if everyone you knows has an iPad you can make calls within that walled garden for free and don't need to be allocated a phone number. Admittedly more useful since so many people have an Apple product.
Anything where you want a phone number and to communicate with the rest of the phone network, I'd expect to pay money for it. Google Voice is the (only?) oddball here.
If you want to call POTS numbers, seems reasonable to pay a fee. voip.ms (of Canada, I think) charges ~ $2/month for a number and ~ $0.01 / minute for calls to US/Canada, calls to other subscribers are free. They work with deposits and a balance. Something in that range seems reasonable... maybe a little bit more if there's some work to make it specifically kid friendly (parental controls for incoming/outgoing calls?)
Fair enough...$10/mo seems high. And I say this as someone in the target demo.
What price point would feel good to you?
I am working on a similar service for my own needs (and some other friends). But, my current plan is to hit $100/yr or so but the hardware is included in that cost. I am assuming $2/mo for costs of the number and minutes and retail costs for VOIP hotel phones is about $50. Hopefully the hardware costs amortize out and then I can offer a discount to users on subsequent years.
(If you want to go DIY you can save quite a bit of money too- I provided some breadcrumbs for doing that in my comment on the parent)
>walled garden
Makes sense to me. Ideally, people outside of my friends and family would not be able to call me on my regular phone either.
You don't want to be able to communicate with your doctor, kid's teacher, someone who is coming to repair your home, a neighbor who just moved in, etc.?
i mean you do for any phone line
I have a Tin Can for my 8 year old – it is terrific and he loves it. He can call friends, grandparents, and his cousins; it is more reliable than the DIY version I was cobbling together with a Pi and some Legos; and my spouse or parents can supervise or update it too.
What tech stack did you use before? It is interesting so many comments mention Pi when there are so many boring VOIP phones.
I wrote an app that some friends use right now. So, always interested to hear what people cobbled together!
> she's found another way to put off getting her [8-year-old] daughter a cellphone
I don't live in the US but my child, who is 9, does not have a cell phone nor does any of his school mates. They "chat" when they see each other in school, or when they hang out together to play after school.
I'm missing the benefit to this over just adding on phone service to my cable internet bill.
We've got a tin can phone and the biggest positive for us is the phone can't make calls or receive calls from numbers that we don't approve first. I know other parents who have the phone line through the cable company that gets hammered with spam calls.
I was going to say Nomorobo fixes this, but it's not supported on most landlines anymore.
Control over what numbers are dialed and who can dial in
This seems to be begging for a DIY project, doesn't it?
A 3d printed case, a little SoC, perhaps a Raspberry Pi Zero, as the brains with asterisk and some additional open source software providing a web interface running on it.
Would i require some public server side component to handle the call routing etc? (or could you just use something like Google Voice?)
I went the DIY route (you can find the details as a parent comment). But, I had good luck with voip.ms as a SIP provider. It is inexpensive at $1.10/month for the phone number and $0.008/min for calling. And it has a pretty good history of user forums, wiki, etc for debugging hints with various hardware.
Why not using the actual land line? I still have one. My 13 year old son, who has no phone, uses it and it works. I'm just curious.
TinCan owner here. The issue with landlines in my experience is that they quickly become overwhelmed with spam calls. That and the ability to lock down the phone to just a few numbers is the appeal.
Mine, in Spain, is surprisingly free of spam. I receive spam on my mobile phone, which is often blocked by Android, but I don't receive spam on my landline. Strange, isn't it?
Depends on the country, but landlines are no long available for new customers and the cables are actively being removed.
There are still VoIP services that function essentially the same. I switched to that recently because the real POTS service had been jacked up in price a crazy amount, probably because we were grandfathered into even having it since the company website didn't even seem to offer it anymore.
Well, I'm sure my landline is not a landline anymore, I'm sure it is some sort of VoIP system, but it doesn't matter, it is a phone with a number, that doesn't leave the living room.
https://archive.is/2025.09.26-193418/https://www.businessins...
>some gen Xers don't say hello..
That's entirely pragmatic in this data collecting age. Being silent and hanging up as soon as you hear the spam won't get you marked as a phone line that has a human on the other end nor do you risk your voice being recorded. If you're silly enough to say your name when answering you'll just end up with text and email that is now personalised with your name (it's much faster to identify and hang up when their best intro is to say "hello who am i speaking to?" on a single person line click).
I don't know anyone in my age bracket (45) who doesn't do this let alone those younger. It's entirely understood and expected. Fuck anyone who says it's rude and those of an age particularly prone to falling for scams (70+ and 15under) should be encouraged to do this. You should be telling your kids "never say anything on picking up, let the caller to your phone identify themselves! They could be scammers trying to get your details such as your name".
I feel all these "OMG the kids don't say hello anymore they have no etiquette!!!" statements are either from the clueless or from spammers frustrated that it's much harder to get through if you don't know their name.
I never answer my land line with "Hello", because predictive dialers recognize that as a go signal for telemarketers. I usually answer my land line with my name, business style. Cell phone is answered with "Hi, ... " depending on who's calling.
> You should be telling your kids "never say anything on picking up, let the caller to your phone identify themselves! They could be scammers trying to get your details such as your name".
How does saying "hello" give scammers your details such as your name?
When I was younger, adults used to answer the phone with "Hello, this is MyName, who am I speaking with?"
Pragmatically, even basic words from your voice can be used to estimate your age, gender, and geographic region (local accents).
But also read other comments, people are saying they answer their phone by stating their name, so plenty clearly use it as a greeting.
I think the op was maybe on a bit of a tear and misspoke, but the sentiment is correct. These days even saying hello can be used to make a decent voice clone with some reasonable (say 50%) chance that it is you (your phone number is linked to a ton of information). I would personally try to minimize my exposure to this risk even if it is somewhat paranoid.
Weird, I've never encountered this.
I go further.
Even if I am expecting a call from a service provider, insurance, bank, whatever…
They’ll want you to identify yourself, name, dob, address.
Never do this to unverified inbound callers.
And how do you verify an inbound caller is who thru claim they are and not a scammer?
You don’t. You tell them you never give out PII to inbound callers as they are indistinguishable from scammers.
Then call the them on their publicly listed number and deal with the issue from there.
We need to encourage service providers to stop doing that as it is exactly leads to people being more easily scammed.
Theres a class of spam calls that start with what sounds like a pitch rising "bloop". 100% of the time this is a spam/scam.
Not sure what system they're using, or why there's that characteristic BLOOP.
The 'bloop' is a beep for the other person being dumped onto the call. Typically in a call center/contact center system like this, the agent's headset is always live. When the 'bloop' comes in, it's an audible cue for the agent to actually pick up themselves as their ringtone on the line. At the end of the call they hit 'release' and wait for the next 'bloop' to go live again.
Smartphones are good and we shouldn't demonize them.
Judge the tree by its fruits. Children are showing very real signs of addiction, and unlike known quantities like video games, or TV in past generations, parents are being pressured into handing children a device, usually completely or effectively without any safety controls, a private screen with which everyone in the world, every corporation, foreign country, friend or foe, can pour propaganda, toxicity, lies, porn, etc. directly into their brains. We should be careful with this.
Before the smartphone did all this, no one would have come out and campaigned to build a new kind of free library outside every middle school where all these things were advertised and made readily available to kids anonymously. We do have real libraries, but they don’t just automatically accept and push books donated by any random company, foreign country, or random pervert. Because that’s an insane thing to do.
The burden should have been on the “smartphones are good” people to prove that giving kids all that was worth the downsides, or to have shown how any supposed benefits could be had more safely, without requiring all parents to become experienced MDM admins, which they just won’t do.
Smartphones are good. Addiction is physical compulsion. Nothing else is addiction.
You sound exactly like the people who were freaking out about comic books and video games. Moral panic, forever repeating.
Full circle moment.
Somewhat OT:
It is actually amazing how far with a couple of tin cans, greaseproof paper taped around one end, and string attached to the paper. You are not going to do VOIP, but 50 yards is possible.
Even more OT:
One Xmas my Dad (unredeemable gadget freak, early adopter of the TRS80) gave me and my little bro two wired handsets with batteries and a ringer. We wired up brother's bedroom to living room, but soon realised our horrible mistake:
[ring, ring]
"Can I have a glass of water?"
[ring, ring]
"Can I have a glass of water?"
It lasted less than a day.
We also had a similar setup that did morse code, that was much less intrusive, not least because me and my little bro did not know morse, except for SOS.
You mirrored my kid communication tech experience, except mine was with my neighbor next door. My brother and I were 13 and 12 respectively. The neighbors were two girls: 14 and 12. Bedroom windows about 22 feet apart.
Our list of experiments included: Written signs Tin cans Morse code circuit Wired handset Walkie-talkies
The fun lasted a couple years until puberty struck.
When I was 12 or so (might have been older)? I had convinced my parents to buy me a lantern battery (6v) and lots of wire. I connected all in series - two speakers and the battery connecting my room to my brother's room. Unfortunately only I could control which speaker was acting as a microphone (I had to swap the battery terminals the wires were connected.)
I guess that was my "tin can".
Most of those "ideas" are basically :
- take a phone, remove features, package with bright colors, profit (or VC then profit, maybe).
Sadly a lot of those aren't recycling old gadgets, they are just making new ones and block features, lock down in their own "store", etc. I think it's actually quite terrible.
Yes, and dumbphones exist (again). You can buy a newer version of the Nokia 3210 that charges with USB-C and works on modern cell networks.
The main feature I want for my kids is an explicit allow list to keep them from gettin spam or talking to randoms.
The manual I found doesn't seem to have this feature. Also the advertising page has "Cloud Apps for news, weather, and more" :( https://www.hmd.com/en_int/nokia-3210?sku=1GF025CPD4L02
Yes you should check KaiOS phones for that.
Now the problem is that they're not "dumb" enough as they have a web browser, youtube etc, but that can be considered fine because the experience for those is so bad that it's unlikely to get addicting.
This sounds like a brilliant idea. But I suspect they’re going to wedge themselves unnecessarily in the middle to extract and enshittify.
I don’t see why these would ever need to be more than a pay once product.
I fail to see any benefit over:
1. dumb phone with fixed dial contacts
2. properly set smartphone which can be used as dumb phone with restricted contacts and no app install allowed, apps screen time limited to zero or heck even browser disabled in guest profile
3. kids smartwatch with parental controls which limit who they can call and who can call and message them, I'm just working on one of these and it's great even for seniors
If you don't like kid having wearable with them I have shocking news for you - you can leave all of the above at home!
Btw. kids nowadays don't really call each other, they text (IM) each other. And for the record I am one of those few parents who didn't give phone/tablet to their toddlers hands like majority of people do wheever they are (public transport, car, waiting room, etc.), my older elementary school kid has "dumb" phone (my old Symbian Nokia, but he use it only for calls/SMS anyway, though I will probably switch to restricted smartphone since it's inconvenient even for me not being able to send whatsapp message, battery is crap and classmates have whatsapp as well), my younger elementary school kid doesn't have anything, but when she goes outside alone she takes Motorola walkie talkie with roughly 0.5-1km range in city.
edit: related call scene from Fight Club how Tyler properly answers the phone (not answering but calling back and his first response is "Who is this?"):
https://youtu.be/tlw677Une_Q?si=xj3Sce9RdQ-_UfZP&t=85
...not mention of encryption.
Although the idea is lovely, I'm not going to encourage my kiddo to chat with his buddies on a service that can hoover up their imagination for later manipulation.
This is the ultimate "parents think it's great, kids will think it's lame" product. I mean, I like it. And just the name conjures images of GenXers yelling at clouds on TikTok about how they used to use tin cans or Solo cups connected with string to talk to their friends, so it's clear who they're targeting with the marketing. But if I were 11-13yo and I got this when all my friends got an iPhone? I'd be furious.
But I dunno. Kids being what they are, seem to be developing curiosity about "retro tech". So maybe there's some sort of whiplash effect occurring among them.
Yeah, I also pause when I read articles like this. The parent in this story is trying to go "full 90s", like that was when kids were raised the best... which just happens to be the time when they were kids. Except, when I was a kid in the 90s, the parents at that time thought the 90s things were horrible and longed for the best time to raise kids... which of course was when they were children.
The entire point of parenthood is to validate your narcissism, you can't talk reason into parents they can only be socially programmed.
I am a dad of two kids, I am doing my best to use reason.
Two use cases:
1. Allowing the kids to call parents and no one else, without all the extra baggage that comes with a smartphone.
2. Multiple families getting together and deciding this is how their kids will communicate with each other (i.e. all agreeing not to get smartphones for their kids).
> But if I were 11-13yo and I got this when all my friends got an iPhone? I'd be furious.
If you've decided they're not getting a smartphone at that age, they'll be furious regardless. They may opt for this as an alternative. Up to the kids.
These are the two uses cases we use it for: call parents, call grandparents, call friends. We bought units for their friends. No smartphones.
Even if they play with it for 5 minutes it's a fun little science lesson if the parents bother to explain what is happening.
$100 is a lot for 5 minutes of fun.
I read it as they were talking about the idea of having kids still go play with actual tin cans and a string in this day and age rather than it be something only old people could have done.
I just meant if they used an actual tin can and string. This is just a wired intercom. There are much cheaper ones on Amazon, several options.
Backordered until December, apparently.
If my 11 to 13 year old got furious they’d swiftly find themselves at an agricultural boarding school in the regions.
This being Australia, likely a particular remote boarding school in a particular hot part of the county.
Come back when you’ve learned how to be reasonable sort of person.
This is for kids who don't yet have a smart phone, not as a smart phone replacement for kids who already had smartphones. I made something similar for my kids(basically, a phone with buttons that can call a fixed set of people), and my kids love it, and use it multiple times per day.
Probably the best thing is a CB radio. Let them talk to any other kids in town but no chance of weirdness.
> Probably the best thing is a CB radio. Let them talk to any other kids in town but no chance of weirdness.
No chance of weirdness? On CB? Have you used a CB?!?
I had a CB in my car for a while and the majority of the talk I ever heard on it outside of traffic updates and cop reports on major interstate highways was weird shit.
Perhaps. But weirdness in a public space is superior to weirdness in DMs.
If the kid doesn't have a smartphone, and looks around and sees kids who do have one, they're gonna be envious and pissed when their parents tell them they can't have one. I know because it's analogous to what I felt when I was still slumming it with my TI-99/4A when every other kid had a NES back in the late 80s.
Your kid is envious about their friends who smoke all the time. Would you buy your kid some cigarettes just so they can be non-envious?
Pfft those suckers didn't have Parsec or Car Wars or Ms. Pac Man plus the hours spent typing TI-BASIC from a magazine was less frustrating than trying to get the jumps right on Super Mario Bros level 8-2. And I'm sure Demolition Division and Meteor Multiplication are why I ended up with a math degree.
For real though I spent so much time pining for Mario 3 before my parents finally did give in. But I feel like there was something good about the diversity, like when I could play Lode Runner on my buddy's C64 (actually a 128... GO 64)
That sentiment has been changing. Kids themselves are seeing social media for what it really is.