Can anyone suggest a cordless phone system that will work throughout an old house?
We've barely had the phone service connected for a month in our new apartment and we are already preparing to return our third set of cordless phones. Something about the structure of the building is causing us much grief.
Part of the apartment is on the second floor of a two hundred year old New England farmhouse. The other part is on the first floor of an adjoining house which is not quite as old. These are connected by a winding stairway, at the bottom of which is one of our two working phone jacks (the other is in our toddler's bedroom, and therefore of very little use). I threw together a
rough diagram of the layout in Sketchup. We were really hoping to use a single-base, multi-handset system, so that we could keep handsets charging and ready in several rooms despite our single useful jack.
First we tried a set of digital 5.8GHz phones from Uniden (
TRU-9460 and
TCX-905). The phones were easy to set up and use, but the sound got a little fluttery as soon as we ventured into any of the upstairs rooms, and a lot fluttery when we went to the two back rooms. I tried walking outside the house and had a good signal on the three sides near the first floor section, but a terrible signal from behind the older two-story section.
So I took these back to the store and brought home a set of digital 5.8GHz phones (
KX-TG5623M) from Panasonic. These phones didn't look as nice to me, and weren't as nicely designed, but I'd heard good things about the performance of Panasonic phones. Unfortunately the sound was just as bad (
and they were harder to use). Back they went.
Speculating that 5.8GHz might be getting sponged up by our old walls I decided to bite the bullet and try 2.4GHz, even though it might not play nicely with my (or my neighbors') 2.4GHz Wifi networks. So I brought home a digital 2.4GHz set from Uniden (
DCT756 and
DCT750 similar to the first set, though the design is a little older and not quite as nice. These phones reach
slightly farther into the upstairs: you can talk on them in all rooms. But they sound very poor, especially from the farthest rooms. There's a heck of a warble up there, and even sitting in the same room as the base they don't sound great, offering my own voice back to me with an annoying hollow ring. I tried turning off all my Wifi gear, but it didn't make a noticeable difference.
My next test will probably be a 900MHz digital phone, though it pains me that manufacturers are treating 900MHz as the bargain basement and shielding it from any of the design improvements they've made in the last decade. Maybe they hope small phone book and caller ID memory will push us to buy 5.8GHz hardware. It makes me fear for the batteries they probably use in the 900MHz models. More annoying is the apparent dearth of multi-handset 900MHz digital phones. The few that are out there don't even allow both handsets to be used at once so that two people can speak with Grandma.
Maybe it sounds like I'm whining, but for $90 or so you'd think you could find a phone system that's usable throughout a three bedroom apartment. This place isn't huge, about 75 feet (23 meters) from end to end, with the phone base close to the middle. The old part of the house is really old, so we don't think there's metal lath, though a friend suggested that there might be a lead component in the old plaster. I'm wondering whether there might be metal sheeting of some sort between the two connected buildings.
I'd be grateful for any general or specific advice about this problem. Have you solved such a problem with a particular model? Is there some kind of a repeater or booster we can use to extend our base station's coverage (without microwaving our bathwater, that is)? And no, we don't want to go cellular-only.
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posted by pointilist at 8:56 AM on November 3, 2006