There is a landline in my house again. After years without one, I put it back on purpose, and it has grown into a small telephone network of its own: a self-hosted phone system, cordless handsets in several rooms, two classic Dutch T65 desk phones in the living room, and a few extensions that talk to Home Assistant to do cool things.
This is the first post in a series about how I built it. Before the how, here is the why.
The multitool problem
A smartphone is a brilliant multitool. Calls, messages, maps, weather, timers, a light switch, a camera: all in one device that is always in your pocket.
That same device is also the best distraction machine ever built. You pick it up to set a timer and twenty minutes later you are still scrolling. My goal is simple: keep the useful tools, lose the distraction. A lot of those tools turn out to work fine on a device that can do nothing else.
It started in the bedroom
The first rule was easy to decide: no smartphones in the bedroom. No checking the news before sleep, no screen as the first thing in the morning.
There was one catch. I still want my family to be able to reach me at night. If something happens, a phone should ring next to the bed. A phone that can only ring and be answered is exactly what that needs. So after years without one, the house needed a landline again. (The other excuse to have a smartphone in the bedroom is obviously the alarm clock. I’ve solved that as part of my multi-room audio setup with Lyrion Music Server and a bunch of vintage Squeezebox Radios, but that’s a story for another time.)
Scope creep, in the best way
Once you decide to bring back a phone line, the next questions arrive quickly. If there are phones in several rooms anyway, why not call each other between rooms? Every phone got a short internal number, and the house got an intercom for free.
And if you are putting a phone in the living room, it might as well be a T65 (link in Dutch). Anyone who grew up in the Netherlands knows that phone. Who wouldn’t want one on the side table? It turns out Marktplaats and Vinted have a lot of those vintage beauties on offer!
That is how a single bedside phone became a small private phone system.
Because it can
With a real phone system in place, the phones started to replace a few more smartphone tasks.
- Weather by phone. With the ha-sip add-on, Home Assistant has its own extension. Call it, choose today or tomorrow, and it reads the forecast out loud.
- Living room lights. The same extension can switch the lights in the living room. Nobody needs this. I built it anyway, because it can.
- Kitchen timer. Set a timer from any phone in the house and the phone rings when time is up. This one runs entirely inside the phone system itself, no Home Assistant involved.
None of these are revolutionary. But each one is a small reason not to reach for a smartphone.
Where this is going
The end goal is a small cabinet next to the front door. When we come home, the smartphones go in. When we leave, they come along. At home, the house phones, the computers and the other single-purpose devices cover what we need.
We are not there yet. But every task that moves off the smartphone brings that cabinet a step closer.
What this series covers
The rest of the series shows how to build this from scratch. You don’t need to be a telecom engineer, but some comfort with Docker and network settings helps.
- Design: the building blocks of a home phone system and how they fit together, plus a numbering plan.
- The phone system: MikoPBX in Docker on a Synology NAS.
- Analog phones: connecting a T65 with a Cisco ATA186 adapter.
- Cordless phones: a Gigaset N510 IP PRO DECT base with five handsets.
- The outside line: connecting a SIP subscription for incoming and outgoing calls.
- Home Assistant on the line: weather and lights by phone with ha-sip.
- A kitchen timer in your phone system: built entirely in MikoPBX.
Next up: part 1, designing the system.