Wireless Phones

Wireless phones are very convenient around the house. They give you the mobility to travel from room to room, going about your tasks while also engaged in a phone conversation. It’s simple and flexible. In terms of hardware, only the handset is wireless, the base station remains connected to the telephone line. The communication between the two units is via radio waves.

The handset of wireless phones contains a rechargeable battery. You just have to place the unit in the base station charging cradle to recharge. Some wireless phones now include two rechargeable AA or AAA cells in place of the traditional and more expensive phone batteries. Home cordless communication devices first entered the market in the 1980s, and Sony was one of the premiere companies to offer wireless phones to the consumer market.

The list of producers now includes many other companies such as Panasonic, Philips, Vtech, Gigaset etc. The devices they produce today advertise a whole range of new features, but not all of them are provided by the wireless phones as such. Some of the features come with the network and the communication service provider. The quality and the range of features attributed to wireless phones depend on the antenna, the method of modulation, interferences and the strength of the signal.

These are factors that vary locally sometimes, yet, they influence the performance of wireless phones, regardless of the top-notch appliance that you may be using. Plain old telephone lines offer limited quality, which is just enough for the parties to hear each other. This limitation results from the use of the typical 3.6kHz bandwidth, that comes with the regular phone lines. High quality wireless phones can transfer this signal to the handset with less interference, but a good match in sound quality is not easy to achieve.

Possible disadvantages of using wireless phones is the sidetone (hearing one’s voice echoed in the receiver), background noise and incomplete frequency response. Yet, if we were to compare wireless phones with cellulars, the latter win in terms of quality, yet, they expose the human body to a higher degree of radiations, which researchers warn to be very harmful.

Wireless communication and technology define the age we live in, therefore, we want these available in our homes, in Internet connection and the old phone line. It’s then understandable why wireless phones are common appliances in average households, and why they continue to be produced with an increasing number of features incorporated.