A couple months ago I was looking at our phone bill and realized that we were paying 3 phones bills for 2 people that hardly ever use the phone. Something about this wasn’t adding up right. We tried to think of a valid reason why we needed to keep the $30 a month landline when we both have cell phones. We couldn’t come up with any, except for the fact that sometimes we just don’t hear our cell phones at home. Sometimes I’ll be upstairs and my cell phone will be on vibrate downstairs, or we’ll be watching TV and we forgot our cell phone in our jacket pocket downstairs. This reason alone kept us tied to our landline. The only solution we could think of would be some sort of bluetooth ringer that would ring with our cell phones, this idea lead us to find the XLink Bluetooth Gateway.

The XLink is a tiny device that allows you to plug your home phone system into it and then pair up to 3 bluetooth cell phones with it. Now any time you get a call on one of the paired cell phones, the home phone system will ring just like you’re getting a call on your landline. You pick up your home phone and talk like you normally would. If you want to make a phone call just pick up your home phone, select which cell phone you want to use (1, 2, or 3) press the flash button and dial as you normally would. If your home phone system supports distinct rings, the kind where you hear a different ring for long distance calls, the XLink will even have a distinct ring for each of the cell phones paired with it so you know who’s cell phone is ringing. There is also a version of the XLink which will work with your existing landline so you can have your landline and your cell phones ring your home phone system.

Things to Consider

While this solution is working great for us so far, there are some things you may want to consider before going down this road.

• If you have kids without a cell phone this may not be a best solution, especially if those kids are ever home alone.
• Do you have more than three people with a cell phone that want in on this solution.
• 911 calls are handled differently as the 911 operator will not be able to determine your location from a cell phone
• For best performance your cell phone should be within 10 feet of the XLink, or else the voice quality will be non-existant, however the phones will still ring.
• With bluetooth turned on your cell phone will check threw battery life much faster, at least that’s the case with my iPhone.
• You’ll probably want a multi-handset cordless phone system, because you can only plug one phone into the XLink

After taking everything into consideration we couldn’t justified paying $30 a month for the telephone landline that we hardly ever used.  The only tricky part so far has been training ourselves to leave our cell phones near the XLink, which will eventually become habit.

Check out the XLink website to learn more: www.myxlink.com