What are Dect Phones
DECT phones have become standard in homes around the world. Find out what they are and how they work in the following article.
Wires are the devil’s work! As a young musician I remember the thing I hated most about live gigs was wrestling with the miles and miles of wire that connected instruments to amplifiers, to mixers, to speakers; a spaghetti jungle of copper wire. Then there was light! The ‘Wireless World’ arrived and, suddenly, aspects of our technical world which had relied on the connecting wire could now communicate with each other using radio waves. Laptops, printers, mice, microphones and, of course, telephones were all freed from the slavery of wiring.
What is a DECT phone?
A member of this wireless revolution was the DECT, or Digital enhanced Cordless Technology phone. These are cordless phones which allow us to wander around our homes chatting away to our friends and family without the restriction of wires. It is used mostly in home and small office systems although it can be used in PBX systems for small and medium offices.
The main properties of the DECT phone are:
- Multiple handsets to one base station and one phone line socket allowing several cordless telephones to be positioned around the house, all operating on the same telephone line.
- Handsets can in many cases be used as intercoms, communicating between each other
- Interference-free wireless operation up to 300 meters outdoors ( in gardens etc). Indoors, walls reduce the range considerably. The system is generally immune to interference from other DECT systems, Wi-Fi networks, video senders, Bluetooth technology, baby monitors and other wireless devices.
- Talk-time of several hours and standby time of several days on one battery charge.
The History of the DECT phone
The technology was developed in Europe in the 1980s and was designed to work with any type of telephone network including the conventional PSTN network, ISDN and GSM networks. The original analogue cordless phone technology came from the Far East but was noisy and unreliable, with poor sound quality. European engineers realized that they could improve the system by going digital. This would improve signal quality, producing less hiss, fewer drop-outs, less interference while introducing the possibility of allowing more phones within a given area, increasing signal security to protect against eavesdropping and creating the ability for the phone signal to cover large areas by switching between base stations.
By January 1988 the European Telecommunications Standards Institute had merged two competing protocols to create a new standard in wireless telephony. This was DECT.
By the mid 1990s DECT was becoming economically feasible as a replacement for copper wire as a means of providing a telephone link to the home as well as providing a wireless capability for handsets in the home.
Although it had been adopted by Australia, Asia and South America, the introduction of the DECT system into the USA was delayed by problems with frequency allocation and radio frequency regulations. It is still the case that DECT has replaced all other standards everywhere in the world except in the USA where a variation of DECT, called DECT 6.0, has been adopted using a slightly different frequency than standard DECT.
How does DECT work?
The handset on a DECT phone communicates with one or more base stations using radio waves. The base station itself is usually connected to a fixed telephone line. The base station needs to have a power supply and the handset is powered by a rechargeable battery, which recharges itself when sitting in the cradle of the base station.
Over the years different frequencies have been used by cordless phones but today the 1.9 GHz band is the most popular DECT phone standard in the USA and is considered more secure than the other shared frequencies.
The future of DECT phones
As a stable and universal standard DECT phones are now the top selling type of phone in the world. In the home most of use would not give a second thought to buying a cordless phone over a wired phone. This demand had produced a large variety of designs and features which allows us to chose a DECT phone that fits our décor and provides us with the freedom and ease of use we have come to expect in the digital, wireless age.
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