Top 10 Reasons for Enterprises to Love Dual-Mode Phones

Service providers rolling out dual mode (WiFi plus cellular) voice offerings are mainly pursuing the consumer market where lower price is the selling proposition. But the consumer market may not be as profitable as the enterprise market. Here are the top ten reasons why. . .

1. Wideband codecs. The wonderful thing about Voice-over-IP is that it can use wideband codecs and offer vastly superior sound quality. With each year that passes the baby boomer generation has greater cause to regret its ear-shattering youthful excesses with the volume control. This is an opportunity that British Telecom has already seized on, with its “Hi-definition Sound” product, and one of Skype’s success factors is its use of the GIPS iSAC wideband codec. Businesses may be willing to pay a premium for “business quality audio.”

2. Coverage. Most phone calls are made from home or from work, yet cellular coverage is often weak in residential areas. Businesses and homes are increasingly provisioned with WiFi, so why not take advantage of this great coverage with a dual-mode phone?

3. Better battery life. The current generation of dual-mode phones has better talk time on cellular than on WLAN. In 2008 this will turn around. The next generation of WLAN chips for handsets has improved battery life to the point that talk times on WiFi will be better than cellular.

4. PBX features anywhere in the world. Once you have hooked up your dual-mode phone to the corporate PBX, you are able to use PBX features when you are away from the office. Not just in WiFi coverage at home and in hot-spots, but using the cellular data network when you are out of WiFi range. Several vendors offer this capability already, the best known perhaps being DiVitas.

5. Get control of cellular expenses. Many corporations have loose policies on cell phones. Employees simply expense some or all of their personal cell phone bill each month. Even among companies that have negotiated bulk discounts with mobile network operators this constitutes an unmanaged expense. Dual mode phones help you roll cellular service into your corporate voice network, and harmonize the voice service billing.

6. Custom and vertical voice applications. The dual-mode smartphone is an attractive platform for ISVs to deliver a raft of niche and vertical applications that will be invaluable to enterprises. For example cellular providers offer push-to-talk already, but dual-mode phones will enable corporate IT departments to roll out private push-to-talk services that blend in features that are too narrow in appeal for service providers to bother with.

7. Only carry one phone. One example of a custom voice application would be a billing module that kept track of which of your calls were personal and which business. Both your personal and business phone numbers could ring on the same phone and you could get rid of your personal cell phone.

8. Only have one phone. The usual business phone is a desk phone. Why not save here, too, by using your dual-mode phone as the only phone at work? The notion of making all your calls from a cell phone is not so radical. Ford has already gone to cellular-only at one 8,000-person campus, and an increasing number of consumers are ditching their wireline phones to use cell-phones exclusively. The difference with dual-mode phones is that calls on the business premises go over the WiFi network, with its superior sound quality.

9. Enterprise managed devices. Smartphones are a security nightmare for IT departments. They are programmable clients on the corporate LAN that are beyond the reach of the corporate manageability systems. The WiFi connection on dual-mode phones gives the corporate IT department direct control of the platform. Nokia has recognized the importance of this in their Eseries line of phones, which has OMA-DM modulation for enterprise manageability.

10. Improve cellular security. The WEP fiasco gave WiFi a bad reputation for security. Now that reputation is no longer deserved. With 802.11i, voice communications over WiFi are more secure than over the cellular voice network.

Moore’s law is doubling the processing power of your phone every 18 months. Feature inflation is driving WiFi into cell phones regardless of whether or not customers are demanding it, and in spite of network operator reluctance. This combination is a fertile foundation for compelling new capabilities, particularly for enterprises. IT

Michael Stanford has been an entrepreneur and strategist in VoIP for over a decade. His strengths are technical depth, business analytic skills and the ability to communicate clearly. In his current consulting practice, Michael specializes in VoIP wireless networks, both WiFi and WiMAX.

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