Lucent Technologies Inc.

At+t Corp.

American Telephone and Telegraph, Co.

Kenneth Kasiske

Susan L Tuttle

Michael L Moroze

David A Fishman

Dale E Lynn

Elizabeth Bauer-Nilsen Sanders

Edwin A Muth

George P Cotsonas

Joanne W Davidson

Alessandro A Subrizi

David M Gresham

William F Dudley, Jr

Dale Everett Lynn

A user of a telephone terminal with an interactive display is provided complete access to all feature choices in a hierarchical menu through a minimum number of menu keys. These menu keys include a 'Next' key, a 'Back' key, a 'Select' key and a 'Home' key. These menu keys occupy minimal space on the housing of the telephone terminal, yet enable the user of the terminal to easily scroll to and select every feature in the interactive display. The user is able to quickly develop a mental model of the feature choices and easily navigate through these menu selections. Context-sensitive functionality also is provided for using the interactive display. As a user completes a command function, the feature choice presented to the user for this function is the one most likely to be accessed by the user, thus advantageously avoiding the necessity of having a dedicated key for allowing the user to select this feature choice.

Hierarchical menu screen interface for displaying and accessing

A cordless telephone public base unit employed in a public telephone system in close proximity with other public base units effectively avoids contention with these other base units for access to a cordless telephone handset unit generating a service request. Contention between the public base unit and the other public base units is resolved by assigning a specific one of a plurality of times during which the base unit may respond to the service request from the handset unit. The time in which the base unit responds to the service request may advantageously be determined by a randomly generated number, the received signal strength of the service request or a combination of these two parameters. Once access to the handset unit is acquired by a base unit and communications between these two units is established on a communications channel, all other handset units and base units are prevented from interfering with the communications between these two units.

Method and apparatus for resolving contention between multiple base

Growing community of inventors

Jackson, NJ, United States of America

Kenneth Kasiske