Dual-Mode Phones and Enterprise Mobility

By Richard Grigonis

Dual-mode phones allow you to seamlessly roam between WiFi and cellular environments, a tremendous boon to mobile and teleworkers. Dual-mode at the moment is making a bit more headway in the consumer space, if only because of the explosion of interest in the Apple iPhone, but enterprises are quickly seeing the advantages of such devices as the workforce becomes more mobile. The biggest obstacle: carrier reluctance.

T-Mobile led the way with cellphones that can roam onto wireless Internet connections both at home and in T-Mobile’s thousands of WiFi hotspots.

As Deepak Mehrotra, Vice President of Mobile Terminal Solutions at Aricent (http://www.aricent.com), says, “Although not directly related to the enterprise space, T-Mobile’s offerings are certainly interesting, since at home or in a hotspot you can connect to WiFi and talk as much as you want. It was a bold move by T-Mobile to do it. Technologically, it’s actually not that difficult to incorporate both cellular and Voice-over-WiFi standards into a phone. Nokia has been doing that for some time with their ‘N’ Series. Basically, dual-mode has been held back by carriers, so I was pleasantly surprised to see what T-Mobile has done.”

Mehrotra’s company, Aricent, is a communications software company that went from a small software development division of Hughes Electronics Corporation 15 years ago to a 6,700-person organization with offices worldwide. Aricent also provides integrated consultancy, design and development services to help companies bring new communications services and products to market.

“As for the enterprise space,” says Mehrotra, “we’ve worked with companies such as Cisco who are fully entrenched in the WiFi or VoIP areas, and have looked at offering handsets that are primarily single-mode but can deal with wireless VoIP. From an enterprise market point of view, having that ability is huge because people can be in offices around the world and yet rely on just a single phone number. They don’t have to make roaming calls when working outside of their main office if WiFi is nearby. So it’s easy to justify dual-mode at the enterprise level; the resistance has been from carriers in the U.S. where phones tend to be subsidized and so the carriers don’t see how they can really make money on them.”

“Some critical events occurred in the last quarter,” says Mehrotra. “One is the introduction of the iPhone, where you have the ability to download all of your multimedia through your own WiFi network. People should be excited about that. Typically the enterprise space leads this kind of thing, but because of the control of handsets by the carriers, the consumer side is now leading things, which means that enterprises will finally receive the advantages of these technologies once we all have these handsets equipped with WiFi, GSM and W-CDMA, even if they have to come from the consumer side. Now we just have to get the equipment costs down. Qualcomm recently announced a new chip which can deal with WiFi.”

“We at Aricent can provide software, device and compliance testing activities for our customers, such as the top six handset vendors,” says Mehrotra. “We have some projects going - nothing big at this point, but we have much capability on the multimedia side in terms of applications. The delivery of multimedia will become easier. That’s great for us because we have a lot of products, particularly codecs and multimedia frameworks, that are very useful to our customers and we can drive that technology to a higher plane, especially now that higher data rates are becoming available on the handsets. Of course faster data rates means more power consumption and so there will be challenges for us, but it’s still within our range of expertise.”

“WiMAX is interesting too - again, it’s a question of when carriers will deploy it,” says Mehrotra. “The challenge is - how can a carrier provide everything? My belief is that if you have WiMAX from one carrier and your regular W-CDMA or GPRS from other carrier, it would be a very difficult thing for a not-so-technologicaly-savvy customer to handle, especially in the U.S. market. In other markets such as Europe, consumers do more market research when carefully buying handsets, so it might work out. A customer could have one subscription to Vodafone and another to some other carrier that’s a offering WiMAX solution. In the U.S. people want to deal with one phone bill, like a triple play bill.”

One Stop Shopping

Bluesocket (http://www.bluesocket.com) offers a top-notch wireless LAN security and management solutions portfolio that can deal with the complexities of mobile enterprises. That portfolio includes the scalable BlueSecure Controller that supports enterprise WLAN deployments from the network edge to the core, BlueSecure Access Points, the Wireless LANPlanner and the BlueView Management System for centralized configuration and maintenance, policy-management, and monitoring capabilities for your infrastructure.

Bluesocket President and CEO, Mads Lillelund says, “We are of the very firm belief that within the next several years, the workforce is going to connect to a mobility environment rather than the Ethernet jack in the wall. That will involve not just your laptop but any PDA or device which the workforce utilizes. Desktop phones are a big cost in any IP PBX infrastructure deployment, but going forward I’m wondering if there won’t be some ‘softness’ that will occur there as some of these devices proliferate in the market. Looking at industry growth and where to position our company, we decided focus on the mobility aspect. We’ve secured the wireless and wireline environment and we’ve created application software in terms of access management, billing, and so forth. We continue to target the enterprise space. We have done city-wide networks too, and have aggressively moved into the hospitality sector.”

“Looking at market trends,” says Lillelund, “we see a much more rapid adoption rate of wireless LANs. We play in a market that will be roughly $3 billion by 2009. In the voice space, that another $3.7 billion by 2009 as well. The market utilizes FMC [Fixed-Mobile Communications], which is another $3.7-3.9 billion market. Because with FMC you must encounter presence client software, which is what we’re testing at the moment. We’ll license out that technology as it matures. Our strategic moves have been to increase our capability within the WLAN environment to offer up voice connections within the WLAN, so we’re SpectraLink certified, we deal with Avaya and anybody who’s doing Cisco VoIP will be able to do the same over our wireless LAN.”

“But then we’ve taken things a step further,” says Lillelund. “The total $10 billion market and the three areas of WLAN, voice and FMC are converging at a rapid pace. That’s why we acquired PingTel, to acquire the call control and PBX features, because from a corporation standpoint, the fact that you can roam between a WiFi and cellular environment and not drop the call is great, but there must be more value to the scenario than that. Our intent as we move forward is to integrate WLAN with voice, and voice will become a bit of a ‘killer app’ within the wireless world as we position ourselves to make a strategic move into the FMC space. We want to be able to take whatever PDA or device the client is using and start to port some basic feature functionality from the PBX side into the PDA. So whether or not they’re in the WiFi environment or actually moving into a cellular environment, that whole capability moves with them. That creates more value to the customer than just the fact that they can roam in and out of a building.”

“The desktop phone has many functions, but most people can only remember about five of them. If we can at least port those five features over, that creates some significant value,” says Lillelund. “Also, corporations will realize that there are some cost savings to all this, and that they’ll be in better control of their cost structure.”

“At the beginning of 2006, many people thought that the acceptability or availability of dual-mode phones would be a barrier,” says Lillelund, “but I think now that that barrier is rapidly going away, if it hasn’t already disappeared entirely. You also see now the advent of the iPhone, and activity in the education vertical. RIM has announced WiFi capability in their newest Blackberry. You can even buy a WiFi-enabled Samsung BlackJack phone in Asia. Overseas consumers are better able to dictate a bit more what kind of functionality they want on their phones. But the technology is there and these kinds of phones are now starting to hit the North American market.”

“We at Bluesocket are all over dual-mode,” says Lillelund, “because we focus on the mobility aspects of the workforce. But we also play strongly in the education vertical. So I think you’ll see a lot of students and educators using such dual-mode devices as well as VoIP. So we’re pretty excited about what’s happening, which is why we made the move to acquire PingTel. With a strategic eye we’ll look at what companies are in the FMC space. But for us it’s really a software play. The software can and will sit within our current controllers or we will position them on a special appliance, depending on what the customers want.”

Getting the Bugs Out

Of course, since WiFi operates in what’s technically an unlicensed band, it’s subject to all kinds of interference. Cognio (http://www.cognio.com) builds troubleshooting solutions that find and solve wireless networking interference problems, enabling business critical wireless deployments to work. Their premier product, Spectrum Expert, can quickly analyze, diagnose, and locate devices within corporate radio frequency (e.g., WiFi, RFID) environments. Cognio sells its solutions directly and in partnership with companies such as AirMagnet, Fluke Networks, and WildPackets.

Cognio’s Co-Founder and CTO, Neil Diener, talked with Yours Truly about the need for spectrum management, policies and plans for enterprise wireless networks.

“Certainly people want one phone and they want it to work both indoors and outdoors. They don’t want to pay for usage when they’re indoors - either in their home or office,” says Diener. “There are a couple schools of thought how that can be implemented; dual-mode phones is one idea. There’s also a movement behind femotcells, picocells and distributed antenna systems that basically just ensures that cellular works better indoors. My opinion is that, if you had to guess how the market will shake out, at least in the transitional period, everything will be dual-mode. The infrastructure side will want to support both cellular and WiFi-type voice applications, and the phone vendors themselves will want their devices to work over both networks. These things don’t settle out quickly, of course, but people want the maximum compatibility.”

“Cognio as a company is more closely involved on the WiFi side of things,” says Diener, “although we do believe that our spectrum-related technology is somewhat band-agnostic and would apply also to the cellular bands. We look at the RF physical layer. This has been of particular concern in the WiFi space as people are concerned about its ability to deliver a reliable service, especially when you consider that WiFi operates in the unlicensed band, which makes it in some ways a sort of experiment by the FCC to see if the industry could itself straighten things out there. Basically that’s what we’re trying to do - deal with the problem that you’ve got lots of other stuff operating in that band that’s not WiFi, such as Bluetooth, cordless phones, microwave ovens, security cameras, motion detectors and even video game controllers - all kinds of things that people decide they want to experiment with and deploy in that unlicensed band. WiFi in most cases runs into difficulty when there is interference from non-WiFi devices.”

“The problem gets emphasized as data-over-WiFi gets supplanted by voice-over-WiFi,” says Diener, “which has been latently there. There’s a lot of interference that eats into your WiFi network capacity, causing things such as retransmissions and jitter. If you’re just running data you won’t necessarily notice it, but when you start to run real-time applications such as voice, you suddenly realize that your WiFi network is not as tuned-up as you had hoped. That’s where we can help. We sell a diagnostic CardBus card and we’re soon coming out with an ExpressCard. By inserting the card into your laptop, you turn it into a smart spectrum analyzer to see what’s happening at the RF physical layer in the WiFi bands. Other WiFi tools, such as packet sniffers and site survey tools using a WiFi card, have been blind to anything that was happening that wasn’t WiFi in nature since they relied on the capabilities of a WiFi chip that wasn’t designed to analyze any non-WiFi signal ‘noise’. Thus, it was practically impossible for people to identify sources of interference. So, we designed our own custom chip and software for our card.”

Of course, with the upcoming deployment of WiMAX on a large scale, we all may end up walking about with tri-mode phones, along with three different kinds of interference to deal with, but who’s counting when you’re having fun downloading multimedia? IT

Richard Grigonis is the Executive Editor of TMC’s IP Communications Group.

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