What is DECT-2020 New Radio (NR), and how big a deal is it? (2021)

As Nordic recently announced: A non-cellular, license-exempt radio standard - DECT-2020 NR - is now part of the 5G standards set by the ITU. How is that even possible? There are many other established non-cellular, license-except 'proprietary' wireless standards, so why didn't they become part of the 5G standards well ahead of DECT-2020 NR? The announcement has understandably raised a lot of questions. Is the adoption of DECT-2020 NR an admission of cellular IoT wireless technology weakness? Is it fair to describe DECT-2020 NR as a 5G wireless technology at all? And do we really need yet another IoT wireless standard? The simple answer is that although it's early days for DECT-2020 NR, it promises to fill a genuine 'gap' in the wireless IoT market for massive machine-type communication. What is DECT-2020 NR? DECT-2020 NR operates in the global, license-exempt 1.9GHz band, which means you can set up a network without frequency planning or spectrum leasing costs. With DECT-2020 NR, you simply build your own private wireless network in which every node can be an access point with a direct backhaul connection to the Internet. In DECT-2020 NR, every node can also be a relay node pushing traffic from a leaf node through as many router relay nodes as needed to get to the sink node. What has DECT-2020 NR got to do with 5G? While DECT-2020 NR is not a cellular technology, its implementation shares fundamental similarities with cellular.