DECT or Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications (formerly Digital European Cordless TelephoneFact: date=April 2009) is an ETSI standard for digital portable phones (cordless home telephones), commonly used for domestic or corporate purposes. DECT can also be used for wireless broadband data transfers. DECT is recognised by the ITU as fulfilling the IMT-2000 requirements and thus qualifies as a 3G system. Within the IMT-2000 group of technologies, DECT is referred to as IMT-FT (Frequency Time).

DECT was developed by ETSI but has since been adopted by many countries all over the world. The original DECT frequency band (1880 MHz–1900 MHz) is used in all countries in Europe. Outside Europe, it is used in most of Asia, Australia and South America. In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission in 2005 changed channelization and licensing costs in a nearby band (1920 MHz–1930 MHz, or 1.9 GHz), known as Unlicensed Personal Communications Services (UPCS), allowing DECT devices to be sold in the U.S. with only minimal changes. These channels are reserved exclusively for voice communication applications and therefore are less likely to experience interference from other wireless devices such as baby monitors and wireless networks.

Application

The DECT standard fully specifies a means for a portable unit such as a cordless telephone to access a fixed telecoms network via radio, but unlike the GSM standards does not specify any internal aspects of the fixed network itself. Connectivity to the fixed network (which may be of many different kinds) is done through a base station or "Radio Fixed Part" to terminate the radio link, and a gateway to connect calls to the fixed network. In most cases the base station connection is to the public switched telephone network or telephone jack, although connectivity with newer technologies such as Voice over IP has become available. There are also other devices such as some baby monitors utilizing DECT, and in these devices there is no gateway functionality.

The DECT standard originally envisaged three major areas of application:Fact: date=April 2009

• domestic cordless telephony, using a single base station to connect one or more handsets to the public telecoms network, which is now available

• enterprise premises cordless PABXs and wireless LANs, using many base stations for coverage. Calls continue as users move between different coverage cells, through a mechanism called handover. Traffic both within the system and to the public telecoms network

• public access, using large numbers of base stations to provide building or urban area coverage as part of a public telecoms network.

Of these, the domestic application (cordless home telephones) has been extremely successful. The enterprise PABX market had some success, and all the major PABX vendors have offered DECT access options. The public access application has not succeeded, since public cellular networks have fulfilled the need better. The one major application of DECT for public access, the Telecom Italia's FIDO network covering major cities in Italy, lasted about a year and was shut in 1997.