Mobile broadband – the next enterprise boon?
While the enterprise dabbles with mobility via Wi-Fi or GPRS, a number of carriers have established mobile data networks that promise to offer the throughput of broadband with the ubiquity of mobile coverage.
3G Mobile Internet: Earlier this year Hutchison 3G launched its mobile Internet service that provides 384Kbps of download speed within “video zones” and can be accessed with a PCMCIA card in a notebook.
Shane Williamson, Hutchison 3G’s developers on Three partnership manager, said Wi-Fi is restricted to hotspots and competing services like iBurst and WiMax don’t have the same coverage as Three’s network.
“The enterprise sales force needs to be mobile, the field force need to access live data, and intranet access for applications like ERP and CRM,” Williamson said. “Enterprises have wanted to do this for a while but bandwidth has been a stumbling block.” Internally, Hutchison 3G is using Salesforce.com-hosted CRM “form factored” for the Motorola A925 phone so that mobile sales staff have access to customer information while on the road.
“We encrypt information from the device which can be used with VPNs and other security measures,” he said.
Hutchison 3G has set up a developers’ Web site (developers.three.com.au) to encourage business to look at porting their applications to the Three mobile network.
iBurst:Under the guise of iBurst, Personal Broadband Australia (PBA) has built a mobile data network covering some 300 square kilometres of Sydney, with Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra and the Gold Coast set to go live in September.
PBA’s chief technical officer Jonathon Withers said neither Wi-Fi nor GPRS fit the bill for true enterprise mobility.
“Wi-Fi has the bandwidth but not the coverage, and GPRS is the inverse as it has the coverage but not the bandwidth,” Withers said. “The demand for iBurst is inevitable. When the mobile phone first came out people viewed it as a high-tech business tool; now the growth in mobile computing devices is strong as notebook sales are set to outstrip PC sales.”
The iBurst service offers 1Mbps of data throughput across an “always-on” mobile network.
When asked why CIOs should consider investing in a service like iBurst, Withers said: “We’re talking productivity gains here and they can be huge.”
Although not positioned as a VoIP service, Withers said the IP-based network is capable of carrying voice and enterprises will be the starting point.
PCMCIA cards are available for corporate notebooks today to access iBurst and the service is cross-platform.
Unwired: Like iBurst, Unwired has built a greenfield mobile broadband network and will offer the service to businesses and consumers. The Sydney rollout starts this month and the company expects it to be completed by mid-August.
Unwired’s CEO David Spence said wireless broadband is about “coverage, capacity, cost, mobility, and convenience”.
Unwired is initially targeting the consumer and small business market but plans to offer a corporate service before the end of the year when its PCMCIA access cards for notebooks become available.
“As these rollouts happen around the world, the volumes will help us bring down the cost of the PCMCIA card,” Spence said. “It’s also a great product to connect a wireless router to for a portable hotspot.”
“The network is totally Telstra-free,” he said. “Uecomm provides the fibre backhaul to our Equinix data centre.”
Navini was chosen because we had the luxury of a large amount of the spectrum and it would take only 70 or so towers to cover Sydney. “Navini is a proprietary technology that is working towards whatever the Wimax standard will be,” Spence said. “Any changes will happen on the base stations.”
Also in the works is a VoIP service that will permit mobile calls to be made from a notebook.
“The technology was built for the voice service as well as the data service and we can apply quality of service to voice,” Spence said.
Unwired is also cross-platform and with the Sydney network in place will be rolled out to other capitals and regional cities with a plan to cover 70 percent of the population.