I couldn’t say for certain, but I’d be willing to take a good guess that there are cordless phones somewhere in the homes of FCC Chairman Kevin Martin and Commissioners Robert McDowell and Deborah Tate.
The next time one of the commissioners picks up that phone, he or she should give some thought to how it came to be there. Chances are someone in the family bought that phone in a big-box electronics store, picking it out from shelf after shelf of phones. Or they could have ordered it online from dozens of more choices.
Cordless phones have gone through a significant metamorphosis in recent years. They started out at 900 MHz, went to 2.4 GHz, to 5.8 GHz. They went from having a big antenna to no visible antenna. Consumers once bought one phone. Now they can buy a set of three phones – a base and two others. The speakerphone, long a staple of the business desktop telephone, is now part of the cordless revolution.