Cordless Phones: You Call, But Who Pays?
Sydney Morning Herald
Wednesday February 17, 1988
If you enjoy lazing by the pool, with a cordless telephone at the ready so you can pretend you are really in the office, here is a thought that could spoil the whole day.
Someone else might be dialling overseas at your expense.
A Telecom officer warned yesterday that there could be thousands of owners of cordless telephones being ripped off.
It works like this.
Cordless telephones transmit and receive radio signals through a base unit attached to the normal telephone cable in the home. If the telephone does not have a security lock, anyone within radio range of the base unit could be putting their calls on your meter.
In 1984 Telecom introduced regulations requiring new cordless telephones to have at least a four-digit security lock, or PIN number, with a minimum of 10,000 combination numbers.
However, Mr Reg Cogar, Telecom's commercial consultant on regulation matters, said yesterday that "heaps" of telephones without security locks had been sold on the Australian market before 1984.
"All some smart alec has to do is come down the street with his phone. As soon as he hears a dial tone he knows he is in range of your phone," Mr Cogar said.
Although cordless telephones operate on five different frequencies, it was"still a distinct possibility" that a person with a pre-lock telephone could find someone else with similar equipment operating on the same frequency.
Mr Cogar said Telecom often received complaints from cordless telephone users insisting that they had not made the STD or overseas calls on their bills.
"All we can say is bad luck, you've been warned," he said.
"We never recommended their use. We fought for five years to stop them being let into the country."
The Telecom officer said cheap models without security could still be bought from some Sydney stores. Although telephones not meeting the regulations can be legally bought, they cannot be legally attached to Telecom lines.
However, none of a dozen Sydney outlets asked yesterday admitted to selling cordless telephones without the regulation security locks.
Mr Stuart Neale, the product buyer for Tandy, said that his company sold regulation equipment only, but many phones without the security codes had been bought between 1981 and 1984.
"There could have been 10,000 or 20,000 sold. We could have sold 1,000 or 2,000 of the phones.
"If people (using phones without security locks) are having extraordinarily large phone bills, I'd say get a new one."
Mr Neale said most of the telephones operated on such low power that they had a radio range of fewer than 250 metres. However, a few had a range of 500 metres and some "even over a kilometre".
Some non-regulation telephones are almost certainly smuggled into Australia by tourists who have made cheap purchases in places such as Hong Kong. Being prohibited imports, the telephones, if discovered are seized on arrival by customs officers.
"We get three or four complaints a day from people who have had their telephones confiscated at the airport," said Mr Cogar.
Mr Neale said Tandy received similar complaints, particularly from people who bought non-regulation phones in the US where the minimum number of security lock combinations required is 250.
"We have had a lot of people complain. We give them refunds," he said.
© 1988 Sydney Morning Herald
