Wifi Revolution

With the advent of BlackBerry (News - Alert) Mobile Voice System, Research In Motion, maker of BlackBerry devices, has started to integrate its devices with corporate PBXs. With the new integration capabilities, announced May 7, users of corporate BlackBerries can transfer calls within the company, dial extensions directly, and gain other PBX functions as if they are using desktop PBX (News - Alert) telephones.

So how does this PBX integration take place? To enable the advertised features, BlackBerry Mobile Voice System includes a BlackBerry MVS Client, which runs on the BlackBerry device. The voice system also includes MVS Connectors, which works with BlackBerry Enterprise Server and provides communications between the server and a company’s PBX. With these technologies, RIM is also using Ascendent Voice Mobility Suite, which was introduced by Ascendent Systems in 2006, to integrate the PBX functions with the BlackBerry server.

One of the major features of Ascendent Voice Mobility Suite is that it supports non-BlackBerry wireless phones too. That means every user can register three or four phone numbers such as home phone, cell phone, hotel room phone, etc. When somebody calls the number, all the numbers will ring simultaneously, giving the user total accessibility over his numbers. RIM obviously plans to keep this important feature.

It’s a bit different story when it comes to PBX integration. Even though work has already begun to make the MVS solution support all PBX equipment, there is still a long way to go. This is mainly because of the complexity of the equipment available and the ever evolving technology. For example, there are 10 major vendors in the PBX arena and a major part of the market using TDM [time-division multiplexing] PBXs. Some of them are planning to switch to IP and some are moving directly to IP and SIP [Session Initiation Protocol (News - Alert)]-based PBXs. In such a situation, it is difficult to come up with a technology that supports all these varied platforms. RIM plans to cater to all these segments by coming up with a connection strategy to handle all of them.

While providing support for different types of phones is an important agenda for RIM, it is also gearing up to provide additional features for the BlackBerry devices and devices running BlackBerry Connect. For example, in a BlackBerry Connect device, mobility application suite will offer more of the standard BlackBerry application suite in addition to the Windows 6 experience. The new technological development by RIM is leading to some interesting innovations which were not really planned by the company. For example, IBM (News - Alert) has shown that with this new technology, users can switch to a voice session from an instant messaging session with a single click.

In addition to all this, RIM is also working on adding WiFi capability to its handsets. The company is planning to deliver these handsets later in 2007. While some of RIM’s competitors such as Palm and HTC already offer WiFi (News - Alert) capability with some of their handsets, it requires the cooperation of the carriers involved to achieve the seamless handoff that customers want between the corporate network and the cellular network. RIM said that the company is working with the carriers to ensure their cooperation.

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Raju Shanbhag is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

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