On Sep 5, 2:21 pm, wrote:
I'm hoping someone has already been through this, because it's driving
me up a wall. I want to buy one of the many brands of cordless phone
where you get a base station and multiple handsets, but I want one
important featu intercom.

Now the frustrating part is that what I grew up calling an intercom
was a device where you pressed a button and spoke and anyone near the
other stations (or a target station) would hear your voice. It seems
that, in modern cordless phones, "intercom" is now lingo for the
ability to ring any of the other phones, which someone must then
answer.

Does anyone know of an actual intercom in the original sense of the
word on a modern cordless phone? I've heard people say that this is
called "paging," but that now seems to have come to mean "making a
handset beep so that you can find it in your seat cushions." In fact,
every word that might have meant what I thought it meant now seems to
mean, "you can make it beep or ring."

Thanks in advance!

--
Aaron Shermanhttp://www.ajs.com/~ajs

You probably need business speaker phones to do voice paging, heres
one:

http://www.smarthome.com/52022.html

There are others on smarthome.com that also do this, "speakerphone
with intercom" is what you want, (unless you want to get into an
expensive centralized phone control system). When you page all
phones, the first one that answers gets the exclusive connection to
you. Not sure if the person answering can simply talk to the
speakerphone or if they must pick up, but at least you would have
whole-house voice paging capability, instead of whole-house ringing.
Conversely I dont know if you can pick up any phone and "listen in"
simultaneously to all the other extensions unsolicited, like the old
intercoms would let you do. But the owners manuals are all out there
at smarthome to find out. There may even be a wireless business
speakerphone with intercom and paging.