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Handsets
Twenty years ago, almost everybody used BT telephone-handsets. Practically
everyone had the same model, and they paid BT a quarterly rent. Today most
people go down to Dixons and buy a cheap Taiwanese model and never think anymore
about it. However it is possible to buy some quite fancy equipment if you need
or want special features.
 | Cordless phones come in two varieties analogue and digital. Analogue
phones are cheaper and are rarely as good as the newer dect handsets.
Analogue phones will work up to about 200 metres from their base station,
but you can halve that for every wall they have to pass through. Dect phones
claim 300 metres, but again two walls would typically reduce this to 75
metres. Dect phones are normally as clear as hardwired phones and do not
suffer from interference from things like flourescent tubes that affect
analogue handsets.
You can connect up to eight dect handsets to one base station, and usually
you can ring from one handset to another for no charge of course. You can
get an analogue cordless phone from about £30 and a dect phone from about
£65. Expect to pay more if you want a built in answerphone or features like
caller id. |
| Answerphones also can be analogue or digital. Analogue phones typically
use a small cassette, sometimes two, to record your 'I'm out announcement'
and to record messages. Digital answerphones use computer type memory to
store all their speech. Digital doesn't always mean top quality though, as
the machines typically compress the messages quite heavily, in order to save
on memory. Many will only store 15 minutes of messages, where a cassette
based machine might store 45 minutes. Most will tag the messages with a time
stamp and most will let you collect your messages remotely by dialling in
and pressing a pin code. |
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