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 (click to hear a sample):

ADVC 2382 The Advice Column with Nicholas Barth
LIFE 5433 Animals of the Pacific Northwest by Christian Shearer
JOKE 5653 The Joke of the Every Few Days
READ 7323 Hear a story
SONG 7664 Hear a song by an artist from the Telehamster community!
NEWS 6397 Telehamster News and Community Bulletin
POEM 7636 Hear a poem
PAST 7278 Stories from Bellingham's history by Marissa McGrath
ABTM 2286 It's About Time (You Called) - Interactive fiction by Tavia Stewart
MATH 6284 Mathematical Mayhem with Simon Graves
TALE 8253 Stories improvised by the Baderson team based on kids' prompts!
FISH 3474 Fun Fish Facts with Sarah G! (and Other Marine Life)
TIME 8463 Date and time, just like when we were kids
LIST 5478 The Phone Book (list of numbers)

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. You can also configure your extension to only allow calls from certain numbers, or to only allow calls to certain numbers.

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. Here is an illustration: