Telehamster lets you use old analog phones to talk to friends!

You can only call other TeleHamster members, not regular phone numbers on the public phone network. There are also a bunch of fun numbers you can call to hear a joke, a story, a poem, a song, learn about a plant or animal, etc. Here are just a few:

HELP  4357 & ADVC 2382 The Advice Column with Nicholas Barth
LIFE  5433  Flora & fauna of the week
JOKE  5653  The Joke of the Every Few Days
READ  7323  Hear a story
TIME  8463  Date and time, just like when we were kids
SONG  7664  Hear a song by an artist from the Telehamster community!
NEWS  6397  TeleHamster News and Community Bulletin
POEM  7636  Hear a poem

We also have big plans for more interactive and creative ways to use these phones together! See the directory for the full list!

What inspired Telehamster?

When we were kids in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, nearly every household had a landline telephone available for the whole family. When we wanted to talk to a friend or grandparent, we could just call them up, easy peasy. Now few households have landlines (they are too expensive anyhow) and kids no longer have a direct way to connect with each other from afar. Instead, they have to ask us to text their friends' parents, or otherwise arrange phone calls orchestrated by us, which result in us handing our screeny blingy Pandora's boxes over to our children. And wouldn't we all like a break from our own cell phones as well?

How does TeleHamster work?

After you sign up, we program for you a small black box with a unique four-digit phone number. You supply a telephone (new or old, rotary or push-button), plug the phone into the box, and plug the box into your internet router. The phone then acts like a normal landline with a dial tone, busy signal, etc, but it is on a private network that doesn't connect to the public phone network, so you can only use it to call other households in the club.

Don't want your phone to live near your router? No problem — you can use a WiFi extender to put your phone anywhere. We recommend these, and you can follow our instructions here to configure them. See our FAQ for more info on this.