What it means for businesses
As I reviewed my family’s most recent mobile phone bill, aghast at the number of text messages my kids use (OK, I’m not much better), it brought back an interesting memory.
More than 10 years ago, I was at Telecom ’99 in Geneva, Switzerland. What stood out during that trip was the number of people walking through and outside the convention centers holding their (relatively large) “cellular” phones up to their ears. Can you even remember when walking and talking on a mobile phone seemed rude? Maybe geeky? Or just plain unusual?
Fast forward 10 years, and now we commonly see people walking with their mobile phones in public places—but the mobile devices are more often in their hands than over their ears. Folks walk around, looking down read or send text messages, while they bang into objects and people. But, hey, it’s all acceptable in the spirit of texting.
We communicate via text in so many ways—email, instant messaging, social-networking sites, blogs, wikis, and text messaging over mobile devices. Sometimes, it’s just easier to send a text message and get an answer to a question without picking up the phone and getting caught up in several minutes of boring small talk.
But what does this acceptable, embraceable behavior mean to businesses and the networks they support?
They’ll need to become more and more resilient and carry exponential increases in capacity year after year. It’s not the text that will drive that growth, though. It’s the video, the multimedia applications, and the expectation that everyone should be able to access anything from anywhere—truly.
The progression already is happening. We went from voice (landline and wireless) to data (text, as previously described) fairly quickly. The shift to video will happen as fast as the applications are available and affordable. Already, mobile devices not only play high-definition video clips and conferences, they also serve as fairly decent video cameras. Users can upload the content from those mobile devices to Web sites in seconds, further increasing the demand to take, upload, and view videos.
As individuals become more and more comfortable with multimedia communications from any device and any location, they also will adopt those same practices at the office. Three-fourths of companies are developing mobility strategies (an 85% increase in the number of companies doing so from 2008 to 2009) to establish guidelines around proper business use of mobile devices, but also to determine how to leverage mobility to increase revenue and productivity, while decreasing overall costs.
Today, nearly 16% of employees are mobile, and companies spend a median of $2,883 per mobile user.
IT staffs must make sure they’re focusing the proper attention toward the networks (LAN and WAN, wired and wireless) supporting not only these mobile users, but the overall traffic increases we’ll see because of the always-on, always-connected mentality that is becoming commonplace.
