Wifi Revolution

DECT (News - Alert) Forum, an international association representing the digital enhanced cordless telecommunications (DECT) industry, this week announced a new technology for broadband home connectivity.

 

The technology, CAT-iq (short for “Cordless Advanced Technology—internet and quality”), is designed to bring together broadband Internet and telephony. This type of convergence is sometimes included in the meaning of the term “fixed mobile convergence” (FMC).

 

A Total Telecom report Tuesday described CAT-iq as enabling the established DECT cordless telephony standard to be used for VoIP and other Internet-based services like audio and video streaming.

 

DECT, Total Telecom explained, “is a well-known cordless technology that has long been used in fixed-line handsets in the home.” The report said CAT-iq is DECT Forum’s way of keeping up with the times, as it were, by upgrading the standard to work with newer technologies.

 

DECT Forum has its eye on the bottom line in terms of staying abreast of technological changes. Total Telecom said in its report that the organization’s own chairman, Erich Kamperschroer, has acknowledged the declining profits of the DECT market.

 

Quoting figures from Kamperschroer, Total Telecom said value of the DECT market in Europe will fall to euro 1.26 billion by 2009, from 2006 estimate of euro 1.8 billion. DECT Forum hopes that CAT-iq will turn that around by generating euro 0.81 billion in revenues for VoIP phones and euro 0.14 billion for other IP-based audio devices.

 

CAT-iq is both a standard that defines protocols necessary to deliver Internet/telephony integration, and a set of specifications regarding form factors and designs. DECT Forum said that the first CAT-iq products should be available by mid-2007.

 

In its announcement about CAT-iq, DECT Forum said that the new technology delivers several key advantages, summarized below. 

“The new technology standard CAT-iq makes use of the fast spreading distribution of global broadband networks and provides a new era of inhouse wireless communication and entertainment products,” DECT Forum chairman Erich Kamperschroer said in a statement.

 

Kamperschroer added: “Consumers, manufacturers and service providers will benefit from cost-effective CAT-iq products which offer interoperability, ease-of-use and groundbreaking new broadband applications and features.

 

DECT Forum said that CAT-iq will be introduced gradually, depending on the type of devices involved. Several rounds, listed below, will launch the technology during the years 2007 through 2009.

Total Telecom noted in its report that CAT-iq is not being marketed as a competitor to wireless LAN, but rather as an add-on for that technology, with the eventual goal that integration will lead to a single home gateway.

 

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