Today, enterprise communications is moving broadly towards Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC). The need to provide for an increasingly mobile workforce is a major consideration borne out by market trends:
Providing communications for an increasingly mobile workforce
52% of SME employees have a company-issued mobile (Yankee Group, Transatlantic Wireless Business Survey Nov 2006).
41% of organisations thought that technology that integrates fixed and mobile infrastructure into one managed solution was vital in managing mobile services within their organisations.
An additional 24% of recipients were ‘very interested’ in services with PBX functionality on mobile devices (Yankee Group 2006)
This highlights the general shift toward FMC that is very much on the minds of enterprise customers.
Other customer requirements include the need for any solution to integrate effectively with legacy equipment. The quality of user experience (clear voice transference, for example) is also important, both internally and, particularly, when liaising with customers.
All these requirements are clearly met by the integration, quality and flexibility of a private mobile network. Adherence to GSM standards provides PMN customers with a significant degree of reassurance in terms of cost-effectiveness, future-proofing, interoperability and convergence with other wireless technologies.
In terms of connectivity, the PMN solution can be designed to provide access to the macro GSM network, as well as a closed ‘island’ user group service, required by some enterprise scenarios.