CAT-iq – Evolution of DECT into the IP era
Bluetooth is beginning to gain wide-spread acceptance
 Bluetooth is standard in almost all cell phones on the market today and is, furthermore, beginning to gain foothold within new application areas like wireless stereo headphones. In a way, Bluetooth and DECT compete within short-range telephony, but although the primary application for both Bluetooth and DECT is voice, DECT has a wide range of advantages over Bluetooth when it comes to cordless telephony.
One of the advantages is that DECT operates in a licensed spectrum, hence reducing interference. Furthermore, DECT was created with telephony in mind, but this does not, however, change the fact that Bluetooth is a technology, which will also be around in the future. At RTX, we have developed a wide range of both Bluetooth- and DECT-based designs, and mastering a number of wireless technologies enables us to make the right design choices when creating new and innovative products. DECT has been living a quiet life for many
years, but the technology is still alive and has proven to be very robust. The market for DECT cordless phones has matured and not even the attack from WLAN on the cordless phone market seems to change the fact that DECT is the standard for cordless phones today. Due to this strong position, there also seems to be a general misconception that DECT is only suited for cordless telephony; the truth is, however, that DECT can be used in a lot of other application areas.
The history of DECT – the early years
The killer application for DECT is definitely voice and the primary objective in the DECT standardization work carried out at ETSI
was to standardize a digital technology for cordless phones (mainly targeted at the European area). After the first edition of the DECT standard became available in 1992, the DECT standardization work concentrated on the definition of the wellknown Generic Access Profile (GAP).
The rationale behind GAP was to ensure interoperability between DECT equipment from different manufacturers. This work and additional demands from the DECT market initiated several extensions and enhancements to the base standard enabling even more effective application of DECT products, which led to the 2nd edition of the base standard being finalized by the end of 1995. The evolution of DECT did not stop here, however; a number of other profiles were also included in the standard. Among these a profile that builds upon a packet-oriented data protocol, DECT Packet Radio Service (DPRS), which enables DECT to carry up to 552 kbps of data per channel.
The emergence of WLAN – friend or foe?
Due to the wide-spread adoption of WLAN, the DPRS addition to the DECT standard has not been a big success; the bandwidth for data transmission simply does not match the market requirements today and it is by far outperformed by WLAN as a data bearer. Currently, WLAN is also beginning to move into voice-based solutions; UMA-based cell phones (i.e. “dual-mode” GSM/WLAN terminals) are
starting to appear along with WLAN-based VoIP cordless phones. At first glance, this would seem to be a serious threat to DECT, but these WLAN-based products still have to prove commercial viability. There is, however, no question about the fact that WLAN is accepted in the marketplace as the wireless data bearer for short-range medium- to high-rate data communication. Furthermore, the Internet Protocol (IP) is becoming still more important in a wide range of applications, and consequently, today, WLAN has an advantage over DECT in this regard. However, DECT has proven its worth on the consumer market, and the technology still has a lot of strengths over existing technologies within a number of specific application areas.
CAT-iq – targeting new application areas for DECT in an IP-based world
 To revitalize DECT and position it in an IP-based world a new extension to the base standard has been added by ETSI. This new extension to the DECT base standard has recently been introduced as CAT-iq (Cordless Advanced Technology – internet and quality). In essence CAT-iq is the result of a focused effort to define, standardize, and market an evolution path for DECT with focus on IP-based applications. This could, however, lead to the impression that CAT-iq and WLAN are competing for the same applications, but in reality it is very likely that both technologies will coexist in future applications. The Internet has been a central driver in both technology adoption and technology evolution over especially the last decade, and it does not stop here. One thing is quite certain and that is that we are just at the beginning of the IP era, and new product categories will definitely emerge in the future. RTX welcomes and supports the CAT-iq initiative since we have already been developing solutions for the application areas CAT-iq aims at (e.g. wireless gaming and VoIP telephony). With CAT-iq, we will have a stronger technology base, which is certain to open the door to more application areas in which DECT or CAT-iq is the best choice.
DECT 6.0 – leveraging DECT in North America
As noted above, DECT was primarily a European initiative, but today the standard has gained world-wide acceptance. However, due to the fact that DECT is based on a licensed spectrum, there might be some small deviations in the allocated frequency range around the world. The adoption of DECT in the USA and Canada has been very slow compared to the rest of the world, since other standards like
Personal Access Communication Services (PACS) were promoted in North America.
The main rationale behind DECT 6.0 is to relaunch DECT in North America and position it as the standard for cordless telephony.
RTX has developed a wide range of cordless phones for the North American market based on both a 2.4 GHz DECTlike solution and US DECT (i.e. DECT 6.0). In fact, RTX was the first company in the world to obtain FCC approval on DECT 6.0. With the DECT 6.0 campaign, there is both momentum and commitment behind promotion of DECT in North America.
Ultimately, this will increase usage of DECT technology in general.
Stepping into the future with CAT-iq
There is a lot of positive energy in the group of companies promoting DECT, and the launch of CAT-iq and DECT 6.0 is expected to kick-start the application of DECT in other areas than cordless telephony; for example high-quality audio streaming. Based on experience and the nature of customer requests, we are more than confident that DECT will be around for at least another decade.
Your vision - our solution
A lot of companies gave up their DECT program some years ago due to various reasons, but RTX did not; due to our extensive knowledge base within DECT and our highly flexible DECT platform, we were confident that DECT is a superior technology when it comes to cordless telephony. Furthermore, we extended our relationship with key chip manufacturers, which enabled us to improve the flexibility and usability of our DECT platform. We have made use of this platform in a wide range of our solutions, and we can tweak it
to make it fit to very special customer requirements. It has among other things been used in the IP-DECT Wireless Local Loop (WLL) solution for Atlas Telecom in Romania, a considerable number of cordless phone designs, and the wireless game pad for the Microsoft X-Box.
Consequently, we are ready to take the next step into the future with CAT-iq.
DECT and CAT-iq simply outperform all other
wireless technologies with regards to voice quality
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