Page 23 - Annual-Report-201704

Home and Office

Connecting Devices in the Home and Office

The variety of devices that need to be interconnected is
growing rapidly and most require broadband. The new
services being developed are creating a ‘Connected Home’
and a ‘Connected Office’.

Our standardisation for home and office focuses on
three aspects: home and office wireless, home and office
interconnection, and home and office requirements, including
Quality of Service (QoS) and security.

Cordless Voice and Broadband Considerable effort went into revising our existing
Communication Harmonised Standards to take account of the introduction of
Our Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications (DECT™) the new Radio Equipment Directive.
specification is still the leading standard globally for digital We began new work on a Technical Report (TR) on the future
cordless telecommunications, with over 1 billion devices of DECT, which will involve collecting requirements for the
installed worldwide, but in 2016 the main focus of our DECT evolution of the technology and studying implementation
committee (TC DECT) was the continued enhancement of the possibilities, such as, for example, for low latency or higher
specification to include Ultra Low Energy (ULE) products. bit rates, possibly using Orthogonal Frequency-Division
Multiplexing and Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO).
ULE is a new networking technology for residential and
building applications. It enjoys all the advantages of the DECT In December we established a new working group to
spectrum and technology but has been developed specifically consider the use of Ultra-Reliable and Low Latency
for the Internet of Things, with potential applications in Communications for streaming and periodic as well as
home automation and energy control such as remote aperiodic traffic profiles.
switches, the control of smart appliances, smart metering
and temperature controls, security, alarms and eHealth
applications. DECT ULE offers low power consumption, Powerline Communications
making it ideal for battery-operated devices and Personal Our Powerline Telecommunications committee (TC PLT) has
Area Networks, as well as good QoS and wider coverage than been addressing the co-existence of Digital Subscriber Line
competing technologies. (DSL) modems and powerline telecommunications (PLT) at
customers’ premises to preserve the high throughputs of DSL
technologies. In May we published a Technical Specification
(TS) for co-existence processing recommendations to avoid
interference between Very-high-bit-rate DSL 2 (VDSL2)
and PLT. Work continued on a test specification for
co-existence mechanisms between PLT and VDSL2/the
G.Fast Recommendation.
To ensure continued protection for utility companies and
customer information, we revised our TS on the Open Smart
Grid Protocol to include updated security requirements.

PLT and Premium TV Services
We have been addressing the transportation of video over
powerlines, in response to the advent of 4K video streaming
and video on demand services for Ultra High Definition
(UHD) television and new advances in technology which
rely on high performance PLT modems. We began work on a
new TS which will define the transcoding of High Definition
and UHD video over powerline networks, with the aim of
In 2016 we updated our two-part specification for Phase 1 improving network coverage.
and 2 of DECT ULE, adding the No-Emissions Mode (NEMo)
and more functionality for operation with repeaters. A new
version of the European Standard (EN) on repeaters, which
now includes ULE, was completed.

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