Making The Landline Cool Again With Wifi

A moment sneaks up on you where you realize your kid needs some way to reach people, and a smartphone is the only option anyone's handed you. Chris Livingston and Bailey Dalton, the couple behind Wiley, ran straight into that moment themselves. And instead of just shrugging and handing over a phone, they built a wifi telephone that solved it in a completely different way.

Here's the video if you want to watch it before you keep reading.

The Moment That Started It

It's a pretty ordinary setup. Chris and Bailey were headed out the door for dinner with friends when they found out their babysitter didn't have a cellphone. No way to reach her if anything came up. That's the kind of small logistical panic that most parents have felt at some point, and usually it just resolves itself and gets forgotten.

For Chris and Bailey, it didn't. It stuck with them enough to make them start looking for an actual fix. Their twin daughters, Greta and Ingrid, were four at the time, and cellphones were completely off the table. So the obvious next thought was a landline.

Except looking into it became a nightmare. Landlines turned out to be expensive, and worse, their house wasn't even wired for one. That's not unusual. A lot of homes built or renovated in the last couple decades never got the copper wiring installed at all, since the FCC stopped requiring phone companies to maintain that infrastructure back in 2019. The landline, as a default household feature, has quietly been disappearing for years. 

So they hit a wall. And that's usually where most people give up and just wait a few more years before handing over a smartphone.

Chris didn't.

From an eBay Find to a Family Hub

Chris bought a vintage 1986 phone off eBay and rigged it to plug straight into their home internet router, which is really the earliest version of a home phone on wifi that Wiley would eventually become.

It worked. Greta and Ingrid, now six, loved it immediately. Chris and Bailey showed them how to use it one singular time, and they were off. Soon enough they were calling grandparents and friends completely on their own.

That's not a small thing. A big part of what parents are actually looking for when they consider one of these devices isn't just "safe," it's "simple enough that a kid can use it without help." A phone that requires troubleshooting or a long tutorial defeats its own purpose.

Word got around. Friends and neighbors started asking about it, and Chris realized the eBay hack had turned into something other families genuinely wanted. So he adapted it to run on WiFi instead of a direct router connection, for more accessibility. 

Most people don't keep their router sitting in a central, kid-accessible spot. Routers tend to live in a utility closet or an office. A family phone needs to live somewhere everyone actually is.

That shift, from a wired hack to a proper wifi telephone that could sit anywhere in the house, is what turned a personal fix into an actual product. 

How to Call a Landline Using WiFi

Since this trips people up more than you'd expect, here's the plain version.

If you're wondering how to call a landline using wifi with a device like this, there's no special trick involved. The phone itself connects to your home network the same way a laptop or smart speaker does. Once it's on your WiFi, it gets its own phone number, and from there it works exactly like any other phone. Pick it up, dial the number, and it rings through, whether you're calling a cell phone, another landline, or a business line.

There's no cellular plan required and no separate app to open first. That's really the whole appeal of a home phone on wifi. It looks and behaves like the landline you grew up with, minus the copper wiring and the technician visit.

Why This Is Catching On Right Now

There's a bigger pattern happening here, and it's worth naming directly, because it explains why this story isn't just a cute one-off.

Retro tech is having a real moment. Vinyl records, physical DVDs, simplified "dumb" phones aimed at kids and teens. People are actively looking for lower-tech options after spending years watching what constant connectivity does to attention spans, sleep, and mood, in both kids and adults.

At the same time, the average age kids get their first smartphone keeps landing somewhere around 10 to 11, and plenty of parents feel pressure to hand one over even earlier. Research on adolescent social media use has connected heavy exposure to increased anxiety and depression, and the concern isn't hypothetical. It's the actual thing keeping a lot of parents up at night, trying to figure out where their own line is.

A landline phone with wifi is stepping into that exact gap. Not as a nostalgia trip, but as a genuinely practical answer to a very current problem.

What Other Families Are Saying

The video and the reporting around it aren't just Chris and Bailey talking about their own idea. Other families who've actually used the phone back that up.

One family beta-testing it described it changing the rhythm of their house entirely. What started as a novelty turned into their kids' go-to way of processing their day, calling just to talk something through, not because they needed anything specific.

Another family mentioned that the phone gets passed around the kitchen like a shared object every time it rings, with all the kids wanting in on the call. That's a pretty different dynamic than a phone that lives in your kid's pocket.

And maybe the sweetest detail: the twins' grandmother said she loves being one of the people they choose to call. It means she gets remembered, and it shows the girls are picking up real phone literacy and social skills along the way.

Because that’s honestly what happens when you hand a kid a genuinely simple way to reach the people they love.

The Bigger Picture

Here's the part worth sitting with. Bailey has said the goal was never really about restricting kids from screens. It's about actually having a tool that makes that possible, since good intentions alone don't get you very far without something concrete to back them up.

That distinction matters. A lot of screen-time advice boils down to willpower and vague guidelines. What Chris and Bailey built is a physical object that does one job well: it lets a kid call somebody, and it doesn't do anything else. No app, no browser, no notification pulling anyone back to a screen they weren't planning to pick up.

The current version of this wifi telephone includes things you'd expect from a modern device even though it looks like a retro one: caller ID, speed dial, voicemail, spam and robocall blocking, a lockable screen so kids can't mess with settings, and Enhanced 911 that shares a caller's location with emergency responders automatically. Parents can restrict incoming calls to an approved list, screen and filter numbers, review call history, and forward calls elsewhere if needed.

A simplified version rolled out earlier this year, with a more full-featured version, complete with an LCD screen, expected later in 2026.

So, Should You Be Paying Attention to This?

If you've been quietly wondering whether there's a real alternative to handing your kid a smartphone before you're ready, this is worth paying attention to. Not because a Utah couple made a cute video, but because the problem they ran into is the same one so many families are running into right now, and the fix they landed on is simpler than most people expect.

A home phone on wifi gives your family its own number and does nothing except let people call each other. No app to manage. No screen to fight over. Just a wifi telephone that rings, and kids who know exactly what to do when it does.

If you've been curious how to call a landline using wifi, or whether a landline phone with wifi could actually work for your household, this is about as close to a real-world test case as you'll find.