O2 Genion Homezone, is it unique to Germany?

There are quite a few O2 employees/contractors who frequent this board, so hopefully they can advise me.

I know the home zone idea originated with Viag Interkom, which was bought out by O2 a few years ago. O2 continues to offer it. Does O2 only offer it in Germany, or do they, or other networks have a similar scheme outside Germany.

More technical question, how come every mobile phone seems to support it, displaying either a picture of a house, or the words home, or something to let you know you’re in your home zone. Is the home zone concept part of the 3GPP specifications? Or have Viag/O2 such industry power that OEMs scramble to support this?

This is of genuine interest to me, or at least to a potential client in North America I’m trying to make interested in me.

This page on the German Wikipedia has a good overview of Homezone and similar services from other providers in Germany.

This page on o2's UK website would suggest that it's supported over there too.

No idea if it's a part of 3GPP these days. When it first came out it was proprietary to Viag Interkom and the handset manufacturers implemented it specifically for them.

I believe that the display of the home zone is a SIM based app, pre-loaded when you buy an O2 SIM. It compares the CellID of your designated home zone with the CellID contained in the periodic broadcast msg of the connected BS. Therefore you can take your Genion SIM card, and stick it into any unlocked phone, and the homezone feature will still work properly. All GSM phones have areas of the display that can be controlled by SIM apps, like a pic of a house, or words in the main display so I doubt the phone manufacturers would have needed to make special O2 phones.

Mobile operator Microcell in Canada (brandname Fido, now owned by Rogers) has had a similar capability for about 6-7 years. Not sure if it's still active. In any event, this is a key feature of landline substitution plans that are becoming popular in NA these days.

I have a question which may be related to this topic. Are there any duplex (GSM and DECT) phones available? It should be possible to make calls over mobile network or using the DECT line at home.
EDIT: Using the DECT line - should be able to register to a DECT base.

The "home" icon was introduced by one2one (now T-Mobile) for their initial homezone service way back in 1993 - as part of the DCS standards, which were rolled into GSM1800, then general GSM for everyone.

When it comes to phone based applications, a vendor will make one firmware for a given market and implement all operator specific requirements for that market in one release, rather than having a release specifically for each operator. I'd guess that all "European" models from a given vendorwould contain requirements for many "European" operators.

This was offered by Ericsson a few years ago, try searching for Ericsson TH337. I'm not sure of anything available nowadays, GSM/WLAN or GSM/bluetooth seems to be the in thing now.

Initially it was supported by OEMs including Nokia. If I remember correctly they aren’t supporting this from last three years and we program this thingy in the SIM card.