“The limited coverage and throughput and the relatively high prices of indoor cellular services make it difficult for mobile operators to satisfy enterprises’ requirements for mobility”, according to report co-author, Dr Mark Heath. “However, the combination of three major technological developments could radically enhance the capabilities available to mobile operators, enabling them to make substantial improvements to their enterprise mobility solutions, and to fend off competing solutions from the WLAN community.”
Key findings from the new report include:
- Indoor base stations will significantly improve the coverage and performance of indoor cellular service, allowing mobile operators to devise different charging strategies for indoor services, including low-cost or free internal calls
- Cellular radio enhancements, such as HSPA+ and CDMA2000 1× Revision B, will increase the throughput and capacity of cellular systems to match those of WLANs, particularly with indoor base stations
- IMS will give mobile operators the functionality they need to integrate and control their indoor base stations and to deliver the flexibility, sophistication and interworking between services that enterprises will expect.
“Armed with these new technologies, mobile operators are well placed to attack the mobile enterprise market”, according to co-author Dr Alastair Brydon. "One approach would be to use the technologies to integrate enterprises’ existing systems and applications with their cellular networks, although this would need substantial support from systems integrators. An alternative, albeit more radical, tactic would be to aim for pervasive cellular mobility, whereby the same cellular network solution is used to deliver all of an enterprise’s services and applications in every environment.
"For some enterprises, the simplicity and uniformity of a common cellular service in all environments will have major benefits”, says Brydon.