Choosing an Intercom for a disabled user?

#1

I need to pick your brains about modern alternatives to copper landline answerphones or speakerphones for a heavily disabled user since we are planning to get rid of our copper landline.

I need to be able to ring home from my 4G mobile and leave a clearly audible message for my wife who is heavily disabled. If she could reply completely hands free, that is a strong bonus. The message does not need to be saved. She cannot hold or pick up a phone, cannot press buttons on a device and her speech is bad enough that Siri has trouble understanding her.

While we do have the normal Community Alarm service in case of emergency at the home itself, any delay in me being able to communicate a change of plans or accident to her could become distressing very quickly. For example last October I had a minor motorcycle accident and had to ride home injured to make arrangements for her care for before admitting myself to hospital.

At the moment we have the copper landline with a normal DECT answerphone that can echo the audio of incoming messages. She cannot pick up or interact with the handset and we rely on her being in the correct room to even hear the message. More often than not she can only hear the tone of voice rather than the content due to distance to the base unit or its overall low volume.

Our answerphone is the last use of the landline so we are looking for alternatives to it prior to ceasing the landline completely.

Our internet is non-BT FTTP provided by Giganet but we do not currently have a VoIP service. It passes through the ONT into an ASUS router and through an unmanaged switch. I own the only mobile in the household (iPhone).

One preference is that only a whitelist of individuals should be allowed to phone in and leave messages to avoid cold callers initiating an audio call.

When I asked these questions on the ThinkBroadband forum it was suggested that we could look at something like the HT801 VoIP ATA unit with a VoIP service but that didn’t answer how we could actually improve the terrible audio from the DECT answerphone. I then spotted the SIP Intercom speakers such as the GSC3505 family but don’t know what other equipment I would need to allow me to call in.

Please could you suggest how we might solve this issue for our home.

Huge thanks from both of us.

Daniel.

#2

GSC + UCM (you need PBX) or cloud PBX (not sure if you can do it better)
Then you can recognize caller ID (multiple) and forward call properly or even make choice for yourself.

UCM can do paging so you can have few GSC in your place and all will play message you speak.
So mobile -> voip -> UCM -> IVR (OPTION) -> multicast-> GSC (can be multiple) or any phone with BT (auto answer to BT). not sure what you can find for your wife to use to hear.

it is little technical so hiring pro could be benefit to set this properly.

ATA is cheap but really not solve problem in complex. As it simply allow you to change copper to Voip with what you have.

This is only one of few ways how you can do it with reasonable amount of $$$

#3

Thank you for the detailed reply. I will have a look at the UCM6300/6300A. We will also want to use either a single IP DECT basestation and handset or a wifi phone as well as one GSC Intercom speaker. Once I have had a look at the product pages and manuals I will make a list of questions to check our specific use case and place it in the correct sub-forum.

#4

Thank you all for the help and advice offered to my queries about the intercom and similar. I am happy to say that I have just put in an order for a UCM6300A, a WP822 handset and the GSC3516 intercom, all direct from GrandStream.

Once the kit is here and confirmed working I can then go ahead with our VoIP number migration away from BT.