I saw a commercial yesterday for a device called the Emerson Switchboard. According to the announcer, the Switchboard allows you to, while connected to the Internet via a dial-up modem, receive a quick call or fax sans a second line.
How is this possible? The two clues I picked up immediately were you need to have call waiting and the incoming call that you’ll receive has to be ‘quick’.
Thanks in advance for the replies!
I am sure you could have figured this out. It picks up the call waiting tone and allows you to take the call if you want. When you choose to take it, it switches over to the waiting call and allows you to talk briefly. The reason that it has to be quick is that your internet connection with typically cut you off if it doesn’t hear from your modem pretty often.
The device might also “talk” to your modem while you’re taking the call, trying to make your modem think that nothing has gone wrong with the connection. Of course the higher layer operations are smarter than that and will eventually time out after a certain amount of time has passed with no “real” communication to their peers on the other side of the dial-up connection.