Mobile phone giant Nokia has predicted massive savings for
users replacing traditional corporate PBXs over the next few years
with mobile telephony and virtual PBXs within their
offices.Joe Barrett, director for industry marketing at Nokia, said
businesses could deploy mobile phone base stations on campuses and
even within buildings to create local mobile phone networks.
By using location-based services in conjunction with such base
stations he said, "We can tell where a user is making a call and
allow free calls within the user's home network." A second tariff
would be levied on users making calls into the office, and a higher
tariff would be charged for normal mobile phone calls.
Barrett believed the Nokia approach to mobile communications is
superior to traditional PBXs and other alternatives offered by
business, which are designed to allow roaming between mobile phone
networks, 802,11 wireless Lans and Bluetooth. "There is no need to
maintain a fixed voice network or desk phones," he said.
Barrett added that the disadvantage with roaming between 802.11
and mobile phone networks was that a call would be suspended when
the user moved between the two types of network. This would not
happen if all calls were made over a mobile network. For the user,
Barrett said the savings in using mobile phone technology for all
corporate telephone usage can be as much as 20%.
In terms of future devices, Barrett said users should expect to
see devices and networks supporting faster networks based on the
high-speed downlink packet access, which provides network bandwidth
of 10Mbps for downloading and 6MBps for uploading data.
Later in the summer Nokia is introducing an updated version of
its 6800 corporate mobile phone, which will include client software
from Research In Motion, to allow the phone to send and receive
corporate email in the same way as RIM's popular BlackBerry
device.