European cordless phone standards gain pace 18 June
The DECT (Digital European Cordless Telephony) Operators Group and the DECT Forum, two leading organizations in the field of digital cordless telephony, have announced plans to merge. The move is a significant one, Newsbytes notes, as it means that the industry now has one voice as far as DECT is concerned.

DECT is a digital cordless telephony standard that is primarily used in the PABX (private automatic branch exchange) market, although digital cordless phones are now starting to appear on both the US and European markets, Newsbytes notes. The advantages over analog cordless phones are several, including frequency agility, security against eavesdropping, frequency re-use, and the ability to use many mobiles on one single base station.

The combined organization will operate under the name of the DECT Forum and aim to make a stronger worldwide impact on the promotion of both the DECT standard and DECT applications, Ericsson officials claim. Dual-mode DECT/GSM (global system for mobile communications) handsets can be used as DECT units in the office, and digital cellular handsets on GSM when out and about.

The original DECT forum consisted of Alcatel, Ericsson, Nokia, Philips, and Siemens. The DECT Operators Group, meanwhile, was founded in 1994, and consists of 25 DECT operators in Europe, Australasia, South America, and South Africa.

According to the DECT Forum, 27 countries have adopted the DECT standard and several others are in the process of allocating frequencies to the technology. The system is fast becoming a world standard, Newsbytes notes.

According to Richard Cox, a consultant with Mandarin Technology, a UK telecoms consulting firm, DECT has established itself in the UK and Europe as a business digital cordless standard. "The problem is that, despite its obvious advantages over other cordless systems, it has never been taken seriously in the consumer market," he told Newsbytes.

Cox claims that DECT is superior to CT-2 (cordless telephony type two), a digital cordless system promoted in the UK and Western Europe in the early 1990s, but which never took off. "With DECT, there is good chance that the system will become a world standard," he said.

Unlike CT-2, however, many DECT systems do not conform fully to a common air interface (CAI) system, meaning that a DECT handset from one supplier will not necessarily work on another manufacturer's home or office base station.

That may change, Newsbytes notes, as the DECT Forum is promoting the GAP -- generic access profile -- standard, which will allow all DECT products to work to a common set of standards, and allow all hardware to be used with other hardware.

(Steve Gold/19960617/Press Contact: Lena Hyttsten, PR Manager, Ericsson Business Area Networks, tel +46-70-560-1016, fax +46-8-4220460; Richard Cox, Mandarin Technology, +44-973-311111, Internet e-mail richard@mandarin.com)


From the NEWSBYTES news service, 18 June