At the Consumer Electronics Show, Lucent showed me its Everest chip set , which completes a turnkey solution for 900-MHz frequency-hopping cordless phones. The DSP uses a Bell Labs forward-error-correction technique called "Clear-Effect," which automatically corrects burst errors and multipath fading. It's the clearest conversation you'll ever have with a $49 phone, insisted marketing manager Rich Ubowski.

The 900-MHz digital cordless market is expected to grow 48 percent by 2002, the Lucent marketer said. Ubowski believes some 90 million units will ship in 2002, citing data he compiled from both Dataquest and Forward Concepts.

More impressive was the rollout of the Home Wireless Networks (HWN) networking system, which uses TCP/IP at 900 MHz to connect computers and (um) cordless phones. HWN is financially backed by Lucent, and the rollout featured a talk by Nobel Prize winner Arno Penzias of Bell Labs. Like the HomeRF consortium, HWN uses cordless-phone consoles as home-network controllers. Unlike HomeRF, which is a just-approved paper standard, HWN has products you buy now off its Web site.

Lucent executives said they were impressed with HWN because its cordless technology was a "step beyond" the PC-to-PC connectivity advocated by other home-network systems. But why- in the absence of some kind of speech recognition, a voice-activated command-and-control capability-does a cordless phone serve as the network controller?

Manufacturers like Lucent must see the phone system as ubiquitous and the cordless home phone set as an extension of that system. Perhaps Penzias' comment at the HWN rollout is an insight: "You'll send an e-mail to the phone company to complain when your telephone goes down, right?"