We just got our kid one of those cheap prepaid "dumb" cellphones, works fine and he can take it with him if needed.
Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids
251–260 of 265 posts
Re: Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids
#252I 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
Thanks for linking this. What is the monthly spend? And how long ago did you do it? Has it grown/stayed the same/or decreased in its use?!
Re: Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids
#253I 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
Thanks for linking this. What is the monthly spend? And how long ago did you do it? Has it grown/stayed the same/or decreased in its use?!
I've built two of these, with the two phone numbers I average about $5-7 a month on a Twilio pay-as-you-go plan. I had a long standing issue with incoming calls that I fixed in January, and usage has definitely increased from about $3 a month before that.
Re: Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I know as a kid I would have hated that and put a lot of effort into circumventing it.
Re: Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 locat…
Thank you for this little window into what it really takes to make this work.
Re: Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids
#256Re: Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids
#257This 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…
FYI - your support email at havenphone.com is bouncing back as not found.
Re: Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I’ll send you a message to your support account :-)
thanks! of course that email was misconfigured for a few hours. fixed now!
Re: Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.?
Eh they can be added to my contacts and then fall under "friend" I guess lol
Re: Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids
#260Why 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 f…
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.
Yeah.
Of all the Apple software piss-off's I've had over the last few years, I feel that Screen Time is a broken mess. So many things don't work, require newer versions of iOS than the device supports, etc.
I've used it for years on my sons devices and it's a constant hassle.