Well, I'm discouraged. I'm looking for strongly encrypted cellular telephones, but I can't seem to find many. Are you looking for cellphones, or cordless phones? There aren't a lot of strongly encrypted cordless phones out there, but there may be some. Digital spread spectrum is probably the best that's easy to find; other kinds of "digital" phones usually pick a not-too-busy frequency and transmit digitized voice, which is mildly secure against other people using your base unit to make their phone calls, but doesn't protect your
At 07:18 PM 1/30/96 -0500, prmoyer@magpage.com (Philip R. Moyer) wrote: privacy against anyone with digital-capable equipment. The middle ground between cordless phones and cellphones includes cordless phones with ranges of about a mile (AT&T and some other vendors have sold them); they're typically in the $300-500 range, and use spread spectrum to avoid interference to/from other phones. It also includes phone services that can handle portable phones that you have to stay in one place to use (i.e. once you start your phone call, if you go out of range your call gets dropped rather than handed off to another cell.) I'm not aware of commercial service like this in the US, but there are wireless PBXs that work this way (which can be cheaper than stringing phone wires around buildings.) Cellphones, of course, can only (usefully) use encryption if the cellular service provider uses it (i.e. if the end that's listening to your radio transmission can decode it :-) American cell-phone providers don't. The GSM phones used in much of the world have encryption, but it's apparently not very strong.
I would really like to avoid using a GAK enabled product, if there's any way to avoid it (even if it means paying lots of extra $$$).
I'm not aware of any GAKed cordless phones, though I supposed there could be such. US cellular phones don't need GAK because the government's strong-armed the standards committees into using appallingly trivial crypto - none of this strong 40-bit RC for you :-) #-- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts@ix.netcom.com, Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281 # http://www.idiom.com/~wcs