TILTS: Cell phone extensions for the home

Remember the good 'ol days when you were with your family and wanted to call to wish someone happy birthday? Each person in your family would run to a separate room and grab an extension phone so they could all listen and speak at the same time. Well, actually one person would dial the phone number and once it started ringing would yell "PICK IT UP!" to everyone else in the house.

Fast forward a couple decades where cell phones are commonplace. So commonplace in fact that many people have begun dropping their hard-wired home phone lines in favor of an all cell phone solution.

There's just one problem with this. Only one person can talk on the phone at once now. Oh, I know you can put the cell phone on speakerphone but c'mon, how fun is it really to have everyone crowd around a cell phone on speakerphone shouting back and forth and asking the person you are calling if they can still hear everyone every five minutes?

Multiple cell phones tied to the same phone number?

So my technology I'd like to see is cell phone extensions for the home. I want a way to have 2 or 3 cell phones all tied to the same number. Or, if that's not possible, I'd like to at least have one master cell phone with a handful of extension-only cell phones that only work when the master cell phone is engaged in a call.

Better yet, what's stopping us from continuing to use the regular corded and cordless phones we have in our house with our existing cellular plan? I can envision docking my cell phone in some sort of home base that automatically routes my incoming cell phone calls through the telephone wiring in my house to my existing phones.

This all seems pretty straight-forward to me but then again, I'm no engineer. If you know of any such existing technology or have a way to improve on what I've already described, chime in and let me know by leaving a comment below. I'd love to hear what you have to say!

Disclaimer: Technologies presented in the TILTS series are based on my original (and sometimes delirious) thoughts. I present them here to the public only because I can not afford to implement any of them myself. If you steal borrow one of my ideas and end up filthy rich because of it, please remember where you got the idea and throw a little love my way. Something like a BMW or a big fat check would do just fine.