Cell/Wi-Fi convergence based on novel approach

Start-up Agito Networks officially removes its cloak of invisibility today with the announcement of the company and its first product, an enterprise router designed to pull company cellular phone traffic onto the corporate Wi-Fi network when employees are on-premise.

Agito joins a host of other players, including start-up Divitas and carriers Sprint and AT&T, out to bridge these radio realms, what some call the hottest issue in wireless.

Click to see: Agito RoamAnywhere 4000 Series

“Mobile convergence is the single most important trend in wireless today,” says Craig Mathias, a principal with the Farpoint Group consultancy. “Phones with Wi-Fi, cell, maybe even support for WiMAX mobile built in, will finally get us to the point where the mobile phone is our only phone. We won’t have desk phones anymore.”

At the very least this convergence simplifies the life of mobile professionals by giving them one contact number and one voice mail box to tend to, instead of versions of both for their desk and cell phones. But Agito co-founder and Vice President of Marketing Pej Roshan says mobile convergence runs deeper, compensating for spotty cell phone coverage, containing cell costs and providing more traditional enterprise phone controls.

Roshan, who worked in Cisco’s wireless network business with Agito co-founder and CTO Timothy Olson, says the company’s RoamAnywhere product consists of a hardened Linux-based routing appliance and software clients for smart phones. The 2000 Series of the router can support up to 100 simultaneous users while the 4000 Series will support up to 1,000. Because the router sits in the call control path instead of the media path, failure of the device won’t take down existing links.

Initial client support will be for smart phones based on Windows Mobile or Nokia’s Symbian operating system. Subsequent releases will add support for Research in Motion’s Blackberry. Provisioning the client is achieved by authorizing user groups and then having users in those groups surf to a URL that walks them through a simple install process, Roshan says. “In a few minutes they can start to make calls.”

Once implemented, calls to a user’s desk or cell phone will ring both devices and, if unanswered, roll into one mail box, as is true with other mobile convergence solutions. Agito’s secret sauce is in how it uses location awareness to figure out when to hand calls off from one environment to the other and its support for location-aware routing policies.

Agito says studies and customer experience show the bulk of cell calls -- 65% in the case of one beta user -- are made from within company buildings, so it set out to ensure those calls are handled by Wi-Fi. However, instead of using signal strength to decide which network to use to handle calls like some competitors do, it bases the decision on location awareness ascertained using radio frequency technology.

“Signal strength varies widely within buildings, so we create route points at ingress and egress points and use those to make routing decisions,” Roshan says. After the appliance is installed, these points are created by taking a phone to each entrance and pushing a button, he says. The appliance acknowledges that point as an entrance and pushes that information out to other clients. Then when someone carries a dual-mode phone into the building past one of these points the device will automatically switch from cell to Wi-Fi and vice versa on departure.