Mobility Goes Seamless

"It changes the game because now the solution is coming from the IP telephony side, as opposed to just the pure data side," said E.J. von Schaumburg, executive vice president of business development for WPCS International, a wireless systems integrator based in Exton, Pa.

Von Schaumburg said the move also bolsters the need for more extensive RF surveys. "That's great news for us," he said.

Motorola last week introduced three new products for its Enterprise Seamless Mobility solution, based on architecture developed with Basking Ridge, N.J.-based telephony vendor Avaya and wireless networking vendor Proxim, Sunnyvale, Calif.

The Motorola CN620 Mobile Office Device melds WLAN and cellular technologies in one handheld unit, while the new Motorola Wireless Services Manager and Network Services Manager facilitate and manage the handoff from one network to another.

"What Motorola has done is create a tool that enables a person to take with them the productivity tools they have at their desk, wherever they go," said Tony Pirih, corporate vice president and director of operations at Motorola, Schaumburg, Ill. "So that's one device, one phone number and one voice mail."

The Motorola products work with Session Initiation Protocol-enabled IP telephony applications and new WLAN products from Avaya, as well as voice-enabled WLAN infrastructure from Proxim.

The new Avaya WLAN products, co-developed with Proxim, include the Avaya W310 WLAN Gateway and Avaya W110 WLAN Access Points. These new products, along with Avaya's Communication Manager IP telephony software, help complete a voice-over-WLAN solution to support the Motorola CN620. List prices for these products, available now, are $8,995 for the W310 and $495 for each W110.

Motorola executives said the new handheld device also can connect to GSM networks, but declined to name the wireless carrier slated to roll out the phone with its network service plan. The Motorola/Avaya/Proxim mobile solution, which will be sold through Avaya's channel, is due to ship later this year. Component and solution pricing have not yet been announced.

"Partners would be involved in all aspects, including selling all of the components of the solution to doing design, implementation and management," said Mickey Tsui, vice president and general manager at Avaya.

Von Schaumburg and other solution providers, such as Tim McDermott, president of MAC Source, Syracuse, N.Y., said the appeal of this type of solution represents a tangible boost in both quality and real cost-savings in trading more expensive cell phone minutes for voice-over-WLAN minutes.

"The one device is nice, but the ability to move between Wi-Fi and cellular without losing the call is one of the things customers are looking forward to," McDermott said.

Von Schaumburg said his company is now participating in trial deployments of the architecture, which he said more effectively addresses the clarity and quality of VoIP and works much more closely to how the cellular world works. He also said initial demand most likely would come from Fortune 1000 customers because an Avaya PBX infrastructure needs to be in place for it to work.

"So the small office isn't going to throw in a half-million-dollar PBX," said von Schaumburg. "However, there are a lot of large companies that have small offices that can use Avaya's Definity Extender to extend the services of the PBX over an IP network out to those branch offices."

The new products come in tandem with Hewlett-Packard's announcement last week that it plans to partner with wireless carrier T-Mobile in an effort to tap into the demand for fast, seamless roaming between Wi-Fi and cellular networks.

HP's plans call for a late-summer shipment of the iPaq h6315 Pocket PC, a wireless device that includes built-in GSM global phone capabilities with GPRS wireless data, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth functionality. The iPaq h6315--which would be available at T-Mobile-owned stores, through national retail partners and T-Mobile service providers and at the HP SMB store--would be priced at $499.99 with T-Mobile network activation.

Motorola executives noted that the HP/T-Mobile solution is focused on GSM voice and 802.11 data and doesn't include VoIP or voice-over-WLAN capabilities. That's where the demand is, they said.