Siemens Enterprise Communications GmbH & Co. KG is working with Nokia Corp. to polish the hand-over of voice calls between corporate wireless LANs and public mobile phone networks, a Siemens executive said Wednesday.

Using mobile phones that support both Wi-Fi and GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications), employees can make VOIP calls over the corporate wireless LAN when in the office, and use the same phone for mobile calls when elsewhere.

Special software in the phone and on the LAN can also enable seamless hand-over of calls from one system to the other as users move around, keeping costs down and productivity up. The two companies will work to certify the compatibility of that software in some of their mobility products for enterprise users, said Marcus Birkl, vice president of sales for HiPath Wireless LAN at Siemens Enterprise Communications.

The products concerned are Nokia's E series mobile phones for business customers and Siemens' MobileConnect, a fixed-mobile convergence server compatible with its HiPath 8000 softswitch for enterprises or competing products that also use SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), he said.

At Cebit, Siemens is demonstrating the hand-over capabilities of MobileConnect, alongside a new version of its HiPath 8000 software that adds support for the E.num addressing protocol, Asian language scripts, voice encryption and additional team-working features.

To carry out their work on Wi-Fi to GSM hand-over, Nokia will join Siemens' HiPath technical partner program, Birkl said, and will bring some of its phones into Siemens laboratories in order to conduct interoperability and quality-of-service tests.

So far, Siemens has certified Nokia's E60 phone, which runs operating system software from Symbian Ltd., as compatible with MobileConnect, as well as a phone from another manufacturer, the PocketLoox connected PDA from Fujitsu-Siemens Computers GmbH, which runs Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Mobile 5 software.

Siemens already has two other Nokia phones in its labs: the E61 and E70, and will soon begin work on the E65, set to supersede the E60, and on some of Nokia's N series multimedia phones for consumers, according to Birkl.

Siemens and Nokia will also investigate how Nokia's Intellisync mobile device management tools can be used to download the necessary software and remotely configure the phones to use it.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.