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Mobile phones will invade Budapest next year as part of a trial being
financed by the European Commission. The Hungarian study will test a new
type of cordless telephone called DECT – Digital European Cordless
Telecommunications.

In many parts of Eastern Europe, fewer than 10 per cent of homes have
telephones, and a network of mobile phones is an obvious way to avoid the
expense and delay of installing wires in every home. The final connection
between homes and local junction boxes is normally the most expensive part
of the whole network.

DECT allows any subscriber within about 200 metres of a base station to make
and receive calls. It has some similarities with Britain’s network of Rabbit
phones, though that system allows only outgoing calls. The more complex
technical standard for DECT was agreed a year ago, and the equipment is
still undergoing laboratory testing.

Behrooz Rashidzadeh of Scientific Generics, a Cambridge consultancy which is
carrying out the study with British Telecom and the Hungarian, German and
Swedish telephone companies, says the equipment will be tried out in Britain
and Denmark from mid-September. It will be installed and tested in and
around Budapest in January and February next year.

‘We might set up a base station for a housing estate,’ he says. ‘You could
use the handset in the house, the garden and at the local shops.’ He
predicts that a handset will cost about £200.

Because DECT signals can only be picked up a few hundred metres away from
the base station, a small number of radio frequencies can be used many times
in the same city. But Dean Eyers of the market research company Dataquest
points out that with a large number of users and many base stations, ‘you
still need a fairly dense wired infrastructure – it is almost as expensive
as putting in a wired solution’.

The alternative to DECT and traditional wire connections is the cellular
telephone, available in Britain from Vodaphone and Cellnet. Its base
stations cover a much larger area and are designed to allow calls to
transfer automatically from one cell to another without breaking the
connection. Eyers says: ‘My feeling is that we will see a gradual growth (in
telephony) with initial needs being met by cellular rather than cordless
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The European Commission is backing the study because it wants DECT to be the
only cordless telephone standard used in Europe. A single standard could
give the manufacturers economies of scale and bring down prices.