Page 7 - DECT Today - Issue 3 - May 2015

DECT WORLD 2015
DECT World 2015
19-20th May 2015, Barcelona
Meet the speakers!
In the run-up to the DECT Forum’s flagship annual conference, DECT Today took the opportunity to speak with some of the key speakers at this year’s event.
Luca Giacomello, Project Manager, Telecom Italia and Chairman, the HGI Forum
Giacomello has been with Telecom Italia since 2001. He has been working in home network innovation,
joining and then co-ordinating projects as the PMI professional on design of new terminals, qualification and testing of home gateways, small and medium scale field trials, digital home environmental efficiency, home gateways innovation/engineering aspects. He is author of several articles on digital home services and environmental management of TLC activities. He is currently chairman of the HGI Forum.
We spoke to Luca to get his views on the current state and future expectations of the DECT and ULE markets:
1. Luca, please tell us about the most recent projects at Telecom Italia, related to DECT and ULE.
LG: Telecom Italia deployed a VoIP solution in 2012 based on a DECT base station embedded in the home gateway AG Fibra. The customer can make use of DECT phones through that centralised interface, or connect terminals to the analogue FXS ports. In addition, TI is testing DECT ULE solutions in the lab, to evaluate the maturity of the solution and consider it for the deployment of smart home, managed services, which will happen during 2015.
2. What is the Home Gateway Initiative focusing on most in 2015?
LG: HGI has been strongly focused on the smart home, trying to harmonise the plethora
of solutions elaborated by various technical bodies with the main operators’ priorities in this field. There's not only a number of connectivity technologies, but also a huge range of different solutions for the higher layers. This means there is a clear need to define common ways of providing application developers with unified APIs and to influence the industry to achieve a good level of interoperability and application re-use. Interaction with technology providers such as ULE Alliance is fundamental to the development of device descriptions and an abstraction layer design in order to effectively support application developers.
3. How do you see ULE products developing over the next few years?
LG: ULE is potentially the next big thing in the smart home world, as the technology has unique features compared to alternatives, such as the possibility to easily manage voice, coverage etc. On the other hand, deployment of technologies and devices is much more extended – two examples are Z-Wave and Zigbee – and ULE has still to carve out a space in the smart home market.
4. Where do the greatest opportunities for ULE lie?
LG: On the business side, the technology can exploit the huge economies of scale behind the volume of DECT chipsets on the market, with consequent optimisation of costs, and the availability of a huge number of terminals already deployed and able to be easily updated in order to support the ULE technology is a key competitive aspect. On the technical side, the use of frequencies, the coverage and the already mentioned capability to support complex use cases combining voice, messaging,
alarms management should constitute a differentiation factor, but the market is running fast and momentum is needed now.
5. What are you most looking forward to at DECT World in Barcelona this year?
LG: It would be interesting to see that ULE companies are not just showing demon- strations, but commercial and interoperable solutions ready for the market and fully testable in real environment by operators.
Jean-Claude Kiessling, Head of Business Development & Portfolio Management, Smart Home Platform, Deutsche Telekom
Jean-Claude Kiessling has over 20 years of professional experience
in the Information Technology with both technical and commercial expertise in
the Digital Transformation, Internet of Things, Cloud- and Platform-as-a-Service based businesses of the Telecom, Smart Energy and Retail Industries. He currently serves as Head of Business International Development, responsible for the strategy and partnering of Deutsche Telekom’s open Smart Home platform QIVICON.
We spoke to Jean-Claude prior to DECT World 2015:
1. What have been some of the most recent projects in the Deutsche Telekom’s Smart Home Platform team?
JCK: I am very pleased to hear that you’ve heard about the developments of
➔
DECT Today - The Success Story Continues · www.dect.org
7