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What is the voltage of a landline telephone?

I need a landline telephone — but just for 9 hours

  • Like many people, I am totally fine living without a landline. Between my cell phone and Google Voice, I'm covered. Mostly. But now I need a landline for nine hours. I'm going to be doing a long string of promotional phone interviews that requires me to have a landline. At first it sounded like sort of a goofy requirement, but I have to admit that while I am fine with Google and my cell service, they are not perfect. Sometimes they cut out. It's random and it's annoying. A landline would not cut out. I get it. No one wants to listen to a radio interview where the guy on the other end is screaming "CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?" every second breath. But I have no landline. None of my friends has a landline. The office rental/co-working places around here want a small fortune (in the neighborhood of $500 once sign-up fees and rental are accounted for), plus not every space would be appropriate. It needs to be quiet. I would think about getting a hotel, but the interviews run from 6:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., which blows past the usual hotel checkout time so it could end up costing me two days of hotel, which would be pricey. I posted on Craigslist (and Kijiji) but have heard nothing so far. It's a bit of an oddball request that probably just gets lost on there. At this point, I'm considering just calling the phone company and getting a landline, which would cost around $150 for the installation and minimum plan — plus buying a phone itself. For the sake of nine hours! But before I do that, I'm hoping someone here has a brilliant idea about what I might try.

  • Answer:

    Hotels also rent out meeting rooms, and I'd guess that you could likely work out rental for a day rate on a regular room too. Definitely ask, it's very likely that they'd try to accommodate you.

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Check and see if your local library has a meeting room with a land line that you could use. Ask in person, while looking and acting charming. Just about all churches have offices with land lines and many would love to help you.

myselfasme

Make sure if you go the hotel route you verify that you can use the provided phone to call the numbers you need to call without it costing you tons of money - non-local calls are not necessarily going to be free.

brainmouse

Could you canvass the neighborhood for an older person on a fixed income that would "rent" his place for a fee, $150 may be pretty good for some?

sammyo

It sounds like you're making a lot of assumptions in your question and follow-up that are preventing you from actually reaching a solution. You're going to need to look into things like what time your local library opens, and whether or not a hotel will allow you to check out late with a minor fee, etc. If you want this to be easy, just have a landline installed at your house. If you want it to be cheap, you're going to have to do some legwork.

sockermom

Depending on the hotel, you wouldn't necessarily pay for two nights if you miss the checkout time - they might just charge you a $10-20 fee for late checkout. If you explain your situation to the hotel people, they might even waive that fee.

UncleBoomee

If you can get access to a reliable, business class internet connection, I'd go with a VOIP setup with a good quality SIP provider - callcentric has a decent rep. It's pretty easy to get either a wired handset with a SIP connection built in, or you can use a bog-standard analog POTS handset with a SIP adapter - I've been using a cisco PAP2 for years, and its worked beautifully, indistinguishable from the landline in quality and reliability. Perhaps get the hardware from a local rental place so you don't need to pay for an IP handset outright? Alternatively, you can use a softphone SIP client on your computer with a good quality mic/headset, but then you're adding in a more complex setup with more stuff that could go bang. Many business have switched to VOIP for phone service - it's pretty standard for cold-call centres in fact. In the UK, the entire BT analog voice network is all IP based on the backend now.

ArkhanJG

Just a guess but maybe recording studios have or know of somewhere set up for this sort of thing.

Sophont

I don't know if this is in your city or price range but breather is a new startup that offers to rent quiet spaces for short periods of time, it might be worth checking out.http://breather.com/ Maybe you could also try mefi jobs to see if someone who has a landline might be able to help.

SpaceWarp13

If any of them are local, would it be possible to grab a room from one of the radio stations you're doing promos with? If none are local, is there perhaps an affiliated station locally that someone could connect you with? I have to imagine that the stations have had to deal with logistics for this sort of thing before. Bonus: Maybe you can get linked up to stations via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Services_Digital_Network#ISDN_and_broadcast_industry!

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