How many people are there in your household who would use the landline? Most people have switched to personal mobile phones. They are pretty good. But some of uss oldsters resist.
From: CAREY SCHUG via Talk <talk@lists.gtalug.org>
I think my landline provider is going to discontinue my wired service soon.
Mine did, without announcement: someone (not them) cut the trunk and the phone company refused to fix it.
While a search lists many websites with "evaluations", I don't know which are impartial and which are promote one brand or another.
There are a bunch of choices. You may want an ATA (Analog Telephone Adapter) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_telephone_adapter> You may want to ensure privacy. That depends on the ATA encrypting and your ITSP (Internet Telephone Service Provider) doing so too. That's enough to emulate POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service).
I'd also like a table of features, I'm not sure if everything I would want is automatic.
They give you what's easy, not what you want or need.
what I think i want, but maybe ignorance means i should require something else, or one of these things is foolish
--battery backup
Up to you. I mean UPS to you :-}
--want to connect 2 phones, a minimal old style just to always be there
Western/Northern Electric 500 sets won't work: no support for pulse dial (AFAIK) Many ATA's support two lines. But you only asked for two handsets, which is only requires on line because you can put multiple handsets on a single line.
--my current cordless base station for which I have 7 more remotes working off the same base.
Should work with an ATA.
--ability to connect to the hotspot from my mobile if/when the wired internet access fails.
Most ATA's that I'm familiar with (from more than a decade ago) were wired ethernet.
--or tethered from my mobile?
Some ATAs may work with WiFi. I don't know.
is it possible to use tethering from my phone to replace the entire wired network at home? Sorry, I'm ignorant, and is there an auto switch to go between my wired internet router and my home switch to make the crossover automatic in both directions?
ATA's are usually dumb. You probably need a router or something that behaves like a router.
A google search says only the router can switch between one WAN and another, but it seems to me some smart person could make a minimal switch with that capability, since my router belongs to the cable company and I doubt they would want to make a failover to somebody else's internet as a source. If they do, I'm sure they'd charge an extra $100 per month even if i never did it.
Yeah. You need a router with failover capabilities.
Almost certainly more change than I would be ready to make, but is there an open source switch setup to which some smart person has added a heartbeat monitor on the primary wan and will swtich to a second if the primary is down for some interval?
Go crazy: set up an Asterisk (or successor) setup!
Looks like I'll probably have to be happy with manually switching, as in... --Comcast cable internet goes down and stays down. --unplug it from my primary switch --have a Linux computer with bridging software idling to a USB port (or second Ethernet port?) --enable tethering on my phone and connect it to the bridging computer
I assume the bridging software handles dynamic IP addresses, or is that actually built into the tethering on the phone?
Everyone is used to consumers having dynamic addresses. If the consumer's software acts like a server (as a phone does), there are things like STUN to get through NAT. The ATA's I used (very plain and mainstream) supported STUN on their own.