Cordless Telephones: Can You Hear Me Now?
Before the mobile telephone but long after smoke signals, there were cordless phones, a land line with a cordless handheld handset. Cordless telephone conversations are made over radio waves transmitted between the phone’s base and the cordless handset. Communications between the base station and a handset is sometimes limited, with complete signal loss between the different floors of a building not so uncommon.
The base station itself is hooked up to a fixed phone line like standard phones and draws power from a wall outlet. It is this base station that continues to differentiate between a cordless telephone and cell phones (which do not need a base station), no matter the great technological increases of cordless telephone units. These days one may can even find some cell phone-like features in corldess phones.
While they have certainly come a long way, when cordless telephones were introduced to the market the devices were not very reliable and rather expensive. Not only was the operational range rather limited with poor quality sound, but there was no real security or privacy because signals could be easily intercepted by other cordless telephones in the area due to the limited range of channels available. It took about 10 years and a half for cordless telephones to ultimately have an opportunity of becoming familiar home items, thanks to the opening up of the frequency range to 9 hundred megahertz with the arrival of DSS technology.
These two technical innovations resolved the matter of eavesdropping, allowing cordless telephones to take off as favored products. Though cellular telephones are ubiquitous and here to stay, enough still keep landlines in their houses so that cordless telephones remain a profitable business, with new models introduced reasonably frequently. When selecting a cordless telephone, the very first thing to bear in mind is security:these phones are really just radio transmitters and thus subject to eavesdropping, though nowadays requiring a reasonably high level of technical proficiency to do so successfully. In this regard, be certain to choose DSS technology, at the 2.4 gigahertz frequency at a minimum (less than that is less secure while any more impinges on battery lifespan ).
This brings us to the only other major issue: battery lifespan. Avoid using nickel-cadium if at all possible because such battery types have a memory effect unless they are fully drained before recharging. Aside from these two concerns, a cordless telephone’s other characteristics are simply matters of personal taste.
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