Wireless enterprise

Cellular vendors court big businesses

Several leading players in the mobile field-among them Alcatel, Ericsson and Motorola-seem to have concluded that medium-to-large business enterprises hold a vital key to cellular telephony attaining the sort of penetration rate clocked up by the wireline network.

At first sight, given the almost universal perception that business people have driven, and still constitute the bulk of, the global cellular subscriber market to date, the notion that big business might drive the market significantly further may appear odd. On reflection though, this idea has some merit.

A good proportion of the extant business cellular market constituency is made up of elite senior executives, people lower down in the corporate hierarchy whose jobs involve heavy roaming, and a mass of individuals in small, one- or two-person companies. Here Ericsson argues that the small office/home office (SOHO) end of the business cellular spectrum is approaching exhaustion in some markets. Alcatel observes that cellular penetration rates in major corporations tend to decrease as the corporations get bigger.

The major new opportunity, according to vendors such as those cited above, is to persuade large enterprises to routinely equip their staff with cellular telephones that can be used with equal facility on- and off-site. As such they would replace conventional PBX extensions, function as normal cell phones off-site and, conceivably, substitute for individuals' domestic wireline terminals.

Several factors are thought to account for the reluctance of big hitter corporations to fully immerse themselves and more of their employees in the cellular pool. Among the most significant are the lack of cost control implicit in cellular services; the apparent difficulty of integrating mobility into the overall corporate communication system (and also differentiating tariffs for on-site use and off-site use); and the suspicion that cellular quality and reliability are not equal to that of wireline.

All of these concerns are now technically addressable by cellular operators. Intelligent network solutions offer flexible call restriction, the ability to furnish free internal calling and paid-for external calling, and the ability to create mobile virtual private networks. In terms of quality and coverage, new generations of base stations are small enough to provide high-grade service to buildings, or parts thereof. Better frequency re-use techniques, combined with microcellular networks, can currently give impressive densities of around 400 Erlang/km.

One calculation is that, by the year 2000, more than 50% of telecom traffic originating in developed countries will be something other than speech. As such, intranets and the Internet have particular relevance to future big company cellular possibilities. Ericsson, for one, has developed a number of intranet/Internet solutions for those GSM operators aiming to pursue the large corporate cellular business market.

One Ericsson proposal is to locate an access server in the GSM network to terminate data calls digitally and connect them over a leased line to a router in the corporate intranet.

Another is to use the Internet, or other public data network, as a low-cost transport medium through which a "tunnel" is built to carry multiple protocols. Tunneling is a vehicle for encapsulating data packets inside a protocol that is understood at the entry and exit points of networks such as the Internet. In this case, the GSM access server uses a local security server to identify the remote user. A corporate gateway then authenticates the remote user and accepts or declines the tunnel.

Unsurprisingly there are one or two flies in this particular ointment. It may not prove that easy to persuade corporate telecom managers that, in reality, the cost of mobility can be controlled and kept within increasingly tight budgets. The cost of building comprehensive in-building coverage and suitable intelligent network platforms may limit the large corporate cellular opportunity to those operators with very deep pockets.

And, interestingly, a number of the vendors targeting this sector have competitive products in the form of cordless office solutions. When questioned on the threat posed by in-building cellular to in-building cordless, a stock response is to say that the two will happily co-exist. This doesn't seem very satisfactory. Contact Senior Technology Editor John Williamson

Resources mentioned in this article

Alcatel Ericsson Motorola

Link and additional resources on the Net

http:www.internettelephony.com/archive/Global/GT1097/GT1097final.html

GSM Information A page of information from Supercall Cellular (Pty) Ltd.

www.gsmdata.com

Global Cellular Guide Excellent resource with lots of wireless information

Cellular Mobile Worldwide Networks A comprehensive list of countries and the cellular mobile availability in those countries by national networks.