Nokia announced it is developing a smart home platform, Nokia Home Control Center. The platform is opening a new era for networked home services and solutions. Nokia's Home Control Center will be the basis for next generation security, smart home solutions and household energy management systems.
 

The platform is open allowing third parties to integrate their own smart home solutions and services; its core consumer value is the plug and play experience across all solution areas with high security levels built in. All solutions based on the platform can be used through a smart phone or PC locally or remotely. Consumers can monitor and control their electricity usage, switch devices on and off, and monitor different objects, such as temperature, camera, and motion. In future, entire systems within the home can be connected to the Nokia platform, including security, heating, and ventilation systems.
 

"We see there is growth potential in the smart home market", said Teppo Paavola, Vice President, Head of Corporate Business Development, Nokia. "The home of today has intelligence everywhere, but to date there has not been a solution that is interoperable with wide range of home systems that can easily be controlled. We want to create an open solution where external partners can develop their own solutions and services on top of our platform. We believe that the mobile device is an ideal interface to control home intelligence, especially when the user is not at home."
 

Nokia today also announced a partnership with one of Europe's biggest energy companies, RWE. The co-operation aims at developing a comprehensive solution for managing energy consumption and CO2 footage at home. This cooperation combines RWE's energy competence with Nokia's technological know-how.

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Starhome, the leading provider of roaming services and converged solutions, is part of a consortium that has completed integration of an “extended home” remote control platform. This innovative concept will provide mobile services for the “extended home,” an area that will include the home and the car.

As part of the Celtic EnComPAs2 (Enabling Community Communications – Platforms and Applications phase 2) project, Starhome is developing an innovative concept for mobile services for the “extended home.” This environment includes the home, the car and other remote sites acting as a virtual home environment, enabling remote access to home content such as videos, photos, music and other media.

Celtic is a European R&D programme that initiates and runs privately and publicly funded Information and Communication Technology (ICT)/telecommunications R&D projects. EnComPAs2 is being led by Telefonica I+D. Consortium members include Acciona Infraestructuras and Ikerlan from Spain, and TNO ICT from the Netherlands.

The Starhome concept links mobile networks and home networks for the first time, enabling mobile operators to provide value added services for the home. The implementation combines the Next Generation Network architecture, which consists of IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), and a home residential gateway. Starhome is providing the IMS connectivity for the project, including mobile services such as smart call routing between GSM/UMTS and Wi-Fi, depending on the user location.

Shai Ophir, Starhome’s Technology Specialist, believes that Starhome’s concept has the potential to revolutionise the convergence market. “Completing integration was an important step for Starhome and our consortium partners in the development of this cutting-edge technology. This project has the potential to significantly enhance the mobile landscape by both improving the home service environment and extending its reach.

“One exciting prototype being developed by Starhome for this project will converge voice and messaging between car and mobile. The mobile network will capture an SMS being sent to a mobile subscriber who is driving, for example, and will convert the message into a voice call in order to increase driving safety,” said Ophir. 

The DECT Forum, the worldwide association of the home communication industry, announces in its most recent market forecast a rapid growth of CAT-iq enabled gateways, reaching more than 65 million home gateways in 2012. The CAT-iq enabled handsets will follow a similar trend with a growth to 115 million devices by 2012.

CAT-iq, the global technology platform for wireless voice and light data communication, is the successor to the reliable DECT standard. CAT-iq is designed for the next generation of IP networks, operates in a protected frequency band, and is available in almost every region of the world.

The most important benefits of the CAT-iq technology are: superior telephony, full in-house IP connectivity, giving CD quality audio and radio, widescreen messaging, intelligent device management via remote control, energy saving plus real plug and play.
CAT-iq has been developed in particular to support the transformation of global telecommunication networks from the “Plain Old Telephony System” (POTS) to “All-IP” networks. The DECT Forum is aware of this massive
challenge since 1 billion fixed lines worldwide have to be transformed from POTS to All-IP. The transformation, which is already happening, will see its completion in some countries in 2010 and therefore the DECT Forum
expects that the deployment of CAT-iq will increase significantly from 2010.

The DECT Forum forecast acknowledges the growth of voice and data gateways, and foresees that cordless DECT phones will be replaced by CAT-iq handsets. Therefore, most future telephones will be CAT-iq enabled,
including PSTN phones. Legacy DECT base stations and WiFi modems will be replaced by DECT/CAT-iq enabled voice and data gateways.

“The DECT Forum has shown in the past that it publishes the most accurate and reliable forecast of DECT and CAT-iq related devices. In this new forecast DECT Forum members have studied CAT-iq enabled gateway and
handset deployment, based on their own market knowledge of different regions, e.g. North America, Europe and APAC”, says Erich Kamperschroer, Chairman of the DECT Forum. “However, it is not in the scope of the DECT Forum to develop and sell detailed market research data. Therefore the DECT Forum endorses forecasts from worldwide analyst firms that will provide further regional insights of different markets.”

MZA has recently released its “Worldwide Consumer Cordless Telephone Analysis” report for 2008. This report details historic and forecast market trends as well as providing analysis of key competitor market shares.

In 2007 the total number of base units sold declined by 4% to just over 117 million units, compared with 122 million units in 2006. This decline was influenced predominantly by a 12% decline in the North American market. The Latin American market showed strong growth of 25% and the Asia Pacific and Eastern European regions witnessed 3% and 8% growth respectively. Western Europe and Middle East and Africa markets witnessed marginal declines. Despite the fall in total base units sold, worldwide handset volumes remained robust at 166 million units in 2007.

In respect of segmentation by technology, DECT technology continued to grow its share and accounted for 47% of total volume. Analogue’s share fell to 33% with the remainder of the market being made up of other digital technologies (predominantly 2.4 GHz and 5.8 GHz).

DECT technology’s growth in share was largely attributable to phenomenal growth in the North American market, where the technology was only licensed in 2005 and yet in 2007 accounted for 13% of total base units and is predicted to grow to more than 50% by the end of 2008. Latin America and Eastern European DECT market also witnessed strong growth.

Supplier Brand Share
Five major brands currently dominate the worldwide consumer cordless telephone market. Panasonic retained their number 1 position in 2007 with their share rising to 19% of base units shipped (all technologies). They were followed by Uniden, Thomson/GE/Alcatel Vtech and Siemens (now renamed Gigaset Communications), all of whom command market shares of between 9% and 11% of the worldwide market.

DECT now commands a significant share of the overall consumer cordless telephone market and as such the supplier brand positions within the DECT market, influence strongly overall success. Panasonic and Siemens (now Gigaset Communications) continued to vie for first position, with Panasonic just usurping Siemens to take the number one position in DECT base unit sales in 2007. Siemens (now Gigaset Communications) followed closely behind, with Philips, Thomson/GE/Alcatel, Binatone and VTECH also being significant.

Outlook
Many of the regional markets (notably Europe and North America) are increasingly saturated with growth in market volume being driven by replacement of existing models with more feature rich models and in North America the displacement of analogue and 2.4GHz/5.8GHz by new DECT technology models has driven market volumes.

A relatively flat market is predicted worldwide between 2008 and 2013 as growth in lesser developed market such as Eastern Europe, MEA, APAC and Latin America is offset by declines in North America and a flat market in Western Europe. DECT technology will continue to take share from other technologies and by 2011 is predicted to account for almost 80% of total worldwide market volume.

About MZA

The DECT Forum, the worldwide association of the home communication industry, and Informa Telecoms and Media announce that the registration is open now for the 13th Global DECT CAT-iq Conference on February 3rd and 4th 2009 in Amsterdam.

With the release of CAT-iq 2.0 and version 3.0 coming soon, the DECT Forum has reached a milestone and technology shift, enabling innovative products and leadingedge services for IP based broadband home communication. CAT-iq – introduced in 2006 as a new technology standard for All-IP networks and successor of DECT – is reality now and has the potential to leverage the profitability of the entire home communication industry.

“If you are in the home or enterprise communication business or in the broadband home gateway business you should attend the DECT CAT-iq World Conference in Amsterdam. The quality of information and number of attendees has grown constantly over the last years and I am sure that 2009 will become the most successful
conference ever”, says Erich Kamperschroer, Chairman of the DECT Forum.

The DECT CAT-iq Conference 2009 will present the winners of the first International CAT-iq Student Design Competition, which has been initiated by the DECT Forum. With the Design Competition the DECT Forum inspired design students from all over the world to create out of the box products and exciting services for the next generation of home communication. As a participant of the conference you will be able to be one of the first to see exciting award winning CAT-iq design studies and meet their creators.

“Now in its 13th year the DECT CAT-iq Conference will maximize your networking time by new formats: strategy roundtables, audience think tank, open floor discussions and interactive panel sessions. And for your pleasure you can join a canal dinner on a typical boat cruise, which is unique for Amsterdam”, says Giles Cummings, Head of Events Informa Telecoms and Media. “The program of the conference is designed to explore new opportunities with CAT-iq in the IP era. Experience the challenges ahead.”

About DECT Forum

Dutch operators KPN and Reggefiber are planning to roll out FTTH services across the Netherlands, in an investment that could reach EUR6-7 billion over the next five to seven years.  Steve Liput, Lead Consultant and Matt Yardley, Partner at Analysys Mason, look at the significance of this latest annoucement.

In May 2008, KPN announced plans to take a 41% shareholding in Reggefiber. This signalled that KPN was considering a move from an FTTC/VDSL to an FTTH strategy.
Now, according to reports in local paper Trouw, regulatory approval is likely to be granted to the KPN/Reggefiber deal, paving the way for an incumbent-backed
EUR6–7 billion investment in an FTTH network that covers the vast majority of the Netherlands.

Reggefiber was founded in 2005 to provide open-access fibre networks across the Netherlands. It is a stakeholder in several local initiatives in the Netherlands (such as OnsNet and AlmeerNet) and also operates its own network, Glashart, which is currently present in 15 different Dutch communities. In Q3 2008, the company’s various initiatives connected about 150 000 homes. The latest announcement from KPN takes Reggefiber into a new league – up to 7 million homes will eventually be directly connected to fibre.

What precedent is there fore this approach? Significant FTTH deployments have only been seen in Japan and Korea (where there is strong government backing), the USA (though Verizon’s network is mainly urban), and Hong Kong (which has seen commercial deployments of FTTB, but has probably the most conducive demand density in the world). The Netherlands will therefore see one of the first nationwide FTTH projects outside of Asia.

The Netherlands has a number of interesting characteristics that have led to this position:

• Near-nationwide (>90%) cable coverage provides strong competition to KPN’s infrastructure.
• Municipal fibre projects (such as OnsNet) have shown that a new entrant can quickly gain very high, localised market share.
• publicly-supported projects (like the CityNet open-access FTTH initiative) have gained traction in Amsterdam
• new entrants such as Reggefiber have been successful in obtaining the necessary funding to take small municipal projects to a larger scale.

Comment by the editor
Living in Nuenen, The Netherlands, where OnsNet succesfully deployed FTTH, there are some remarks. Allthough a 100Mbs symetric connection is great, in reality the use of that is still limited. Yes, it is great to download and upload huge files in matter of seconds, but no new services have arrived yet.