At the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona this week,
businesses will gain an insight into emerging mobile and wireless
technologies, including high-speed wireless web access on notebooks
and handsets that work over both wireless and wired
networks.
Suppliers will also showcase new mobile business applications at
the event.
Nick McQuire, European senior analyst for wireless and mobile at
Yankee Group, said, "We will see more application development in
customer relationship management and field services for mobilising
fleet and sales staff."
McQuire said the next wave in wireless applications would be
business-specific applications and enterprise resource planning
applications to unlock corporate data and push it out to the
field.
An emerging technology that should help workers on the move
access business applications and information at high speeds is
HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access).
Also known as 3.5G, HSDPA technology offers data transmission
speeds of between 8mbps and 10mbps. This is similar to speeds
experienced on Ethernet local area networks.
At 3GSM, NEC and NTT DoCoMo will be demonstrating prototypes of
HSDPA mobile handsets due for release this summer.
Mike Welch, an analyst at Canalys, said HSDPA cards for
notebooks could be a major breakthrough for businesses. "This gives
you speed for the first time equivalent to mobile broadband," he
said.
However, Welch warned that high tariffs could present a barrier
to the adoption of 3G and technologies such as HSDPA, unless
operators address the issue.
"The question is what are you paying for the connection? If you
are doing it over 3G, you will still be paying for the data usage.
For a business it is the unpredictability of it - your bill might
change month to month and you cannot control it."
Converged mobile systems promise cost savings