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An infinitely simpler version of this is to connect the phones together with a power supply (48VDC) over two (long, cheap) wires to get a good old telephone line -- with no computers involved. Add in some hand cranks to also get the phones to ring.

When I was young, I used to have this with a friend who lived next door. It was amazing to have a free, private, always on hotline. If memory serves me right, it even worked for playing Starcraft over 56K baud modems!

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> If memory serves me right, it even worked for playing Starcraft over 56K baud modems!

You would likely have connected closer to 33.6k. 56k modems can only receive at that speed, to send at that speed, you generally need a digital line like a T1 or maybe ISDN.

Latency OTOH would have probably been very low.

That's V90, V92 could do 56k/48k.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modem#Evolution_of_dial-up_spe... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V.92

Hmm, I wonder how hard it would be to do something like this to get some use out of all the unused POTS wiring in my house.

Not hard at all, if you add a 48V DC power supply ($20 on Amazon) in series with the wires anywhere in the house, you will be able to pick up any phone and talk to the others.

For ringing apparently you need 60-100V AC, I'm not sure what a simple solution for that would look like. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringing_(telephony)

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