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Interview: Walter Tuttlebee
What qualifies you to be a judge for the DECT Awards?
WT: Two reasons: my long history in DECT, and my current activities bringing wireless innovations into other industries.
I started in digital cordless R&D in the late 1980s – when I first met the early DECT pioneers Dag Akerberg and Heinz Ochsner. In 1991 we were acquired by Siemens, and began supporting their cordless phone development, contributing to the DECT standards for Siemens and designing the first Gigaset radio. In 1992 I published “Cordless Telecommunications in Europe” and participated in Siemens strategy workshops in Munich. By 1994, we’d hacked one of the first Gigasets to incorporate a camera – the first cordless videophone. I launched the DECTweb community
in 1997, which worked closely with industry players and the DECT Forum in the early 2000’s, publishing a comprehensive DECT Industry report in 2005, which correctly forecasted subsequent market developments.
I left Siemens in 1999, to become CEO of Mobile VCE – doing R&D
for the mobile industry, initiating Green Radio & Flexible Networking – so had less time for DECT around then. Since 2012, I've been freelance consulting at C-level, helping industry, government and start-ups to use wireless innovations to transform other industries, where I continue to see opportunities for DECT.
What is your perception of the DECT product market today?
WT: When we built that first Gigaset radio, I didn't expect a billion devices to have been sold by now. There's still a healthy market with opportunities
for growth - but undoubtedly the market is evolving and those that don't respond appropriately could face difficulties, even the big players.
I feel passionately about this – when I led Mobile VCE the industry was much more collaborative, where senior technology guys shared their long-term visions. While not everyone gets that, this form of collaboration is one of the strengths of the DECT Forum. Companies need to recognise changes and respond, and avoid looking only through their own coloured spectacles.
So we are seeing wireless being incorporated into a host of consumer products and after a slow and shaky start, it's being adopted as a key enabler by other industries. There are cordless phones everywhere but many other devices are now beginning to be connected. The opportunities for radio are proliferating and DECT is well placed as it's robust, mature and low cost – with dedicated, interference free, spectrum.
Suppliers should put aside conventional mindsets, think beyond traditional boundaries and pursue co-innovation with players from other industries. You can't do it alone and you don't have credibility in an industry where you have no track record. So we need to jointly own innovation with other industries, such as transport, where people are, for instance, already using Bluetooth roadside sensors to track mobile phones, to monitor traffic speeds.
What innovations are you expecting from the DECT Awards entries?
WT: To be honest, I've no idea what I expect! However, I would hope to see some new product categories - things that don't fit into standard boxes, such as DECT technology in products for other industries.
There's a clear trend of added value migrating from hardware to software, and now to service. So I’d hope to see new service concepts presented, using DECT as an enabler. Again, this means DECT players working with companies from other markets, such as travel or even public services.
I'd also like to see interesting design-led solutions. The industry needs to look beyond repackaging to re-imagining products and services that will enable new business models for end users.
How do you see the DECT product landscape going forwards - what for you are the hot spots?
WT: The Internet of Things – leveraging data from disparate sources to create new capabilities – will enable many powerful applications. Data aggregation today happens in datacentres; however, there's a strong case for a distributed implementation, driven by a need for security of personal and domestic data.
For secure IoT applications in the home, like health, DECT’s robustness, derived from its dynamic channel selection and dedicated spectrum, offer reliability that is unique. IoT has huge potential, but today’s IoT products still look like the kindergarten playground.
Early IoT devices in the home don't play well together, systems are isolated and have poor usability. There's opportunity to join them up and deliver simple, easy home IoT management. Over time, as we move towards personal clouds located in intelligent domestic base stations, capable of delivering new services. Beyond this, there is potential to monetise that data beyond the home, using the new, global, oneM2M standard. Combining this with 3rd party data, domestic and from other industries, will enable multi-sided business models involving the consumer, the base-station supplier and such external data and service providers.
People are waking up to these opportunities but the whole industry needs to move together to make it happen. The DECT community can engage with IoT start-ups, provide low cost technology to build into their products, offering standardised SDKs and so on. IoT start-ups can benefit from DECT’s distribution channels and scale, whilst DECT companies can hedge their innovation bets with many such IoT partnerships, at low cost.
DECT FORUM AWARDS JURORS
DECT Forum Awards jurors
Dr. Walter Tuttlebee, CEO, Wireless Technology Innovation & Strategy Ltd
DECT Today editor Manek Dubash spoke to DECT Awards judge Walter Tuttlebee OBE in the run-up to the 2016 DECT World Conference in Barcelona.
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