In accordance with the principles of the present invention utilizing the
BLUETOOTH specification
Cordless Telephony profile, incoming calls to a
cell phone including a Gateway role can be routed to another
piconet device (e.g., another
cell phone including a Terminal role. Two
cell phones with
BLUETOOTH capability each include the
Cordless Telephony Profile. The cell phone receiving the call acts as a PSTN
cordless telephone Gateway cell phone via the
cellular network, while the other cell phone acts as a
cordless telephone Terminal cell phone. The
cordless telephone Terminal cell phone then acts as an extension to the Gateway cell phone allowing both calls to the Gateway cell phone to be answered at the Terminal cell phone, and even allowing calls by the Gateway cell phone to be originated by the Terminal cell phone. Moreover, the present invention includes the ability for any one of a number of authorized Terminal devices (e.g., Terminal cell phone) to answer an incoming call to a Gateway cell phone "
on the fly' after hearing the
ringing at the Gateway cell phone. Telephone calls may be remotely initiated from the Terminal cell phone via the Gateway cell phone. Inexpensive or featureless Terminal devices can tap into advanced features of more expensive Gateway cell phones, without the need to implement the hardware and / or
software for the features themselves in the Terminal device. An authorized terminal
list identifies Terminal devices authorized to answer an incoming call to a Gateway cell phone, and may be expanded to include other feature enable / disable configuration. The present invention also provides an interface between devices having differing
telephony standards, e.g., between an IS-41 cell phone acting as a Terminal and a
GSM cell phone acting as a Gateway cell phone.