1876 Telephone invented by Alexander Graham Bell (believe it or not, the fax machine was invented ~15 years prior to this)
1913 AT&T becomes a government sanctioned monopoly
1946 AT&T begins offering mobile telephone service (this is true!)
1958 AT&T starts selling modems (almost a decade before DARPA creates the internet and more than a quarter century before consumers have access to the WWW)
1984 AT&T is torpedoed by Judge Green's Modified Final Judgement (MFJ) -- this effectively ushers in competetition which drives innovation, and lower prices
2000 AT&T still hasn't woken up to the reality of MFJ (i.e., it's break-up) and is charging rates as high as 35 CPM for domestic calls to more than 20 million of it subscribers
2003 With the introduction of the 5800 series phones, and a new residential VoIP offer, AT&T starts to signal to main street and wall street that it is willing to wake up to the realities of today's marketplace

But you don't need to know the above to appreciate what is, in my opinion, the BEST cordless phone on the market (and I have tried many!). Here's the deal with the AT&T 5800 series...
+ Uses 5.8 Ghtz band and "Frequency Hopping Technology" to eliminate static and security issues
+ Awesome speakerphone on the base station
+ Ergonomics of the unit are unsurpassed
+ Each handset has a speakerphone built into it -- while these speakerphones are not as crisp as the one on the base station, they come in handy when interfacing with those annoying recorded menus that most companies are using today
+ All units include visibile message waiting indication (great for those with voice mail)
+ The unit just feels substantial (they have the sturdy feel of AT&T's old Western Electric produced phones that felt like they could drive rail road spikes)
+ Expansion handsets don't require RJ11 jacks to get dial-tone, they use the house wiring and they also auto-seek the base unit to simplify set-up and intercom signaling
+ For convenience, calls can be transferred from one handset to another
+ Base unit will "speak" the caller ID information -- this is especially convenient for those frequent times that you can't angle around to see the caller ID display

There are some light cons to...
+ The voice mail waiting indication light is so bright (and it blinks) that it has woken me up at nights (the only way to turn it off is to clear voice mail messages)
+ The 5800 series isn't so much a phone as it is a whole house phone system, as a result of this and the EXTREMELY high quality of the product, it is a little more expensive than the 5.8 Ghtz offerings from it's competition -- my opinion is that the extra ten or twenty bucks is well worth it

And I thought the following would be helpful as well...
1) In the past, most cordless phone providers made outrageous claims regarding the range or distance the handset could travel from the base station (AT&T makes no claims with this unit) -- wise shoppers should expect no more than 250 ft of range with the 5800 series
2) For those using the new VoIP technology to save on phone service (e.g. Vonage, Packet8, BroadVoice, Phonom, etc.), this system provides an excellent solution to the whole house wiring problems that these types of services tend to create