Cordless key telephone system capable of quickly answering incoming calls

Abstract

In a cordless key telephone system, access units are located in groups corresponding to service areas for broadcasting radio signals on a control channel or on an assigned speech channel to cordless stations. A main controller selects one of the access units for each service area in response to an incoming call from the switched telephone network and sends a first alert signal to the selected access units to cause them to broadcast a recurrent sequence of second alert signals containing the identifiers of standby cordless stations. The second alert signal is received by each standby cordless station and an ACK signal is transmitted if the received signal contains its identifier. The ACK signal is copied by each access unit for transmission to the main controller, whereupon it returns a proceed-to-assign signal if the number of the received copies of the ACK signals is equal to the number of all standby stations. The proceed-to-assign signal is received by the selected access units and a channel assignment signal is broadcast indicating the assigned channel. On receiving it, each station is switched to the assigned channel and one of the stations in each area transmits an end-of-switching signal to cause the access units to broadcast ringing signals containing the identifiers of the alerted stations. In response to a given cordless station going off hook, an off-hook signal is sent from it and copied by the associated access unit for transmission to the main controller, which returns a turn-on signal to allow the given station to activate its speech circuit.