Planning for a little office reshuffling and reorganzing, the mind of the gadget geek turns to gadgets, unsurprisingly. Ever since I got hooked on AMC’s Mad Men show, I’ve been remembering the visceral pleasure I used to get when I had an old-fashioned, multi-line phone on my desk in a long-ago newsroom. You remember them, right? Black and hefty with a row of clear buttons along the bottom that lit up when a call came in. Press down with a satisfying click to pick up the line or use the red “hold” button to move on to another call.
Turns out, you can still find these old phones, and ones with even more lines and buttons, for sale around the web for not so much money. But there’s a catch. These pre-digital telecom dinosaurs can’t just be plugged into a wall socket. Not even close. They run off of something known as a 1A2 key system that requires a special 25-pin cable running into a proprietary box in your closet that provides all the phone lines plus power. You can buy these boxes on the web, too, but setting one up and getting it to actually works seems like a task for the severely over-rested. I’d love to find someone rewiring these old phones in a way that lets them be connected to a modern phone jack without giving up the multi-line, light-up-button goodness, but I haven’t yet.
As I was pondering this predicament, I thought that perhaps I should try to leapfrog the whole 20th-century phone system and find a voice-over-Internet-protocol, or VOIP, interface for the old 1A2 key phones. Nope, no luck there.
But while I was out googling he universe, I did run across this amazingly spiffy looking, multi-line, light-up-button 21st century VOIP phone by Linksys called the SPA962. It has six buttons that turn different colors, supporting up to six phones lines. And it has a beautiful color screen that show all kinds of things like your contacts. The whole thing works over the Internet, no Ma Bell required. Just connect an ethernet cable and put in your VOIP provider’s info and you should be good to go.
Based on my experience setting up a little Sipura box a few years ago that lets me use a VOIP service connected to our regular phones through an RJ11 jack, I more than a little afraid that setting up the SPA962 might be beyond my abilities. You need to have some sort of VOIP server software like the open-source Asterisk running or another box acting as a sort of digital PBX to get the multi-lines to work and that’s just scary. But I’ll keep reading about it and researching it and who know, maybe by the time I’m ready for the office reboot, I’ll be prepped for installing this gee-whiz Linksys phone.
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