A portable phone or cordless phone is a wireless telephone which is associated with a fixed telephone landline (POTS) and can only be operated close to (typically less than 100 metres of) its base station, such as in and around the house. With a portable phone the users purchases their own base station, which they connect to a landline and to a power supply (usually a "wall wart" type of transformer).
The telephone handset communicates with the base station via radio waves. In the United States, there are four frequency bands which have been allocated by the Federal Communications Commission for use by cordless telephones. These are:
- 43-50 MHz
- 900 MHz
- 2.4 GHz
- 5.8 GHz
See also