The Week Ahead: Enterprises Get Unwired

Looking to unwire your enterprise -- or make money helping others do it? Then this is the week for you, because the CTIA Wireless show began today in New Orleans, and it heralds a week of heavy-duty wireless and mobile announcements, both at the show, as well as away from the Big Easy.

The news is coming hot and heavy already, with some good news for companies looking to make cellular-accessible data an important part of their network and business infrastructure. Sprint announced that it will offer Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that guarantee the performance of its cellular data network for its enterprise customers. The company claims that it's the first company to offer it. Whether it is or isn't the first, it's good news for businesses looking to rely on always-on remote access to data.

Not to be outdone, Cingular Wireless made an cellular data announcement of its own, that it is offering what it calls the first national unlimited EDGE/WiFi data plan, which it claims will make the service available in 13,000 cities and towns and in areas along nearly 40,000 miles of highways.

Nokia, meanwhile, launched its Nokia Internet High Speed Packet Access (I-HSPA) solution, aimed at higher performance and more cost-efficient broadband wireless access. It's designed for high-volume packet data use cases and complements fully mobile 3G.

Motorola weighed in with a slew of announcements, including its Canopy WiMAX platform, planned for general availability in early 2006. The platform includes infrastructure, indoor and outdoor customer premise equipment (CPE) and various management components.Businesses that rely on Lotus Notes and Domino have something to be pleased about as well. Avocent has announced an upgrade to its SonicAdmin network administration tool that allows network administrators to securely manage Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino servers using a smartphone, PDA, BlackBerry or other mobile device. Before the upgrade, SonicAdmin had already allowed network administrators to manage their networks using mobile devices, but didn't include support for Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino.

Expect to see many announcements about integrating cellular and WiFi networks, and having both with VoIP. In fact, they've already begun. Kyocera announced that it is working with Boingo Wireless to let its handsets switch between cellular and Wi-Fi networks. This kind of roaming will become increasingly important as wireless VoIP becomes an industry staple. In fact, Royal Philips Electronics announced today that it has created a reference phone design that can seamlessly switch between cellular and Wi-Fi networks.

There's plenty more as well. So to keep up with all the wireless news out of New Orleans and beyond, make sure to keep checking in get all the news in Networking Pipeline's News section.

Links in This Story

Sprint Offers Wireless Data Guarantees To Enterprises Tool Lets Network Administrators Manage Notes And Domino From Mobile Device

Kyocera Commits To Cellular-Wi-Fi Phones

Networking Pipeline's News section