Acronym for Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications as per ETSI standard EN 300 175. Defines a system for wireless voice calls. While it originally was designed for Europe only (in fact, until 1995 it was Digital European Cordless Telephony), it has been adopted world-wide for wireless telephony meanwile (even in the US).
Today, some consider DECT as a legacy technology and favor Voice over WLAN (a.k.a VoWLAN) instead. Others still see a future for DECT. innovaphone supports both DECT and VoWLAN.
From a VoIP point of view, the disadvantage of DECT for wireless telephony is that it does not allow full IP communication up to the final destination. That is, the DECT telephone itself is not IP enabled leading to not at all, or inconsistently implemented services (e.g. directory lookup through LDAP).