Digital cordless technology is not only the wave of the future; digital standards are being translated into products today.

igital cordless telephony is no longer a thing of the future. After a decade of research and development, technical standards are being translated into products and commercially viable networks. This article addresses the role of digital cordless technology in the transition to the personal communications system (PCS) era. Although this role cannot be predicted with certainty — markets will make their own decisions — we can identify a range of technical, service, implementation, and market issues that will influence it. This discussion is limited to digital cordless systems. Although analogue cordless systems, CT1, are already in widespread usage and still undergoing significant developments and enhancements, digital technology is the wave of the future. This article focuses on developments in Europe, where the development of cordless standards was pioneered. Advanced microcellular radio technologies are also being explored in North America and Japan, but Europe remains unique in having established accepted standards to facilitate volume markets. 1 Because PCS, personal communications networks (PCN), and cordless access have been subject to widely differing perceptions, this article includes a review of the evolution of the pan-European digital cordless standards, as well as a brief summary of these standards — CT2 and DECT — and a description of industry progress in equipment availability and service implementation. The conventional European model of the digital cordless telephony marketplace has envisaged three overlapping applications — domestic, business, and public access (Telepoint). A discussion of this model and the progress to date in addressing each of these applications is also included. Wireless data networking has emerged as a new opportunity of the 1990s — European cordless standards were designed with such needs in mind, and cordless LAN products to the DECT standard have already been announced. This article presents a view of the role of CT2 and DECT technology for such applications and the implications for cordless integrated services. Finally, this article looks beyond today’s technology at current European activities to standardize a Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS), ITU activities on Future Public Land Mobile Telecommunication Systems (FPLMTS), and possible scenarios for the role of cordless technology over the next decade.