Automaker's wireless project hasn't stalled, but isn't accelerating. A trend that has taken the consumer world by storm – ditching home landlines for mobile phone service – is having a more difficult time catching on in the corporate world.Ford Motor Co. brought attention to the workplace alternative a year ago with its announcement that 8,000 employees would be cutting the cord. And although Ford today reports the migration went well, even the automaker expresses concerns about expanding the project – and has no timetable for doing so.“Overall I’d say it has gone very well,” says Jeff Lemmer, IT manager of telecom services at Ford. “Our biggest concern going into this was coverage. [Sprint] has gone beyond our expectations.”</div><p>Lemmer says <a href=”https://www.networkworld.com/news/financial/sprint.html”>Sprint</a> did a lot of work upfront and throughout the 12-month deployment to make sure Ford’s employees would have reliable, high-quality service.</p><p>Although employee response has been positive, he says other issues will prevent the automaker from expanding its deployment for now. Those include the lack of handsets designed for business users, the lack of mature wireless-to-wireline integration products and the need for wireless service providers to change the way they view business customers.</p><p>Industry experts say such issues are undoubtedly keeping others from following Ford’s lead.</p><p>”It’s not surprising that we haven’t heard of many other large business users making the switch,” says Phil Redman, a vice president at Gartner. “There are still a lot of challenges with in-building coverage, lack of features such as four-digit dialing, and poor [device] battery life,” he says.</p><p>Despite inquiries to all of the major wireless service providers, <i>Network World</i> was not able to find any examples of other large-scale deployments.</p><p>”People are in discovery mode” when it comes to cutting the cord to traditional phone services for an all-mobile alternative, says Bob Egan, research director of emerging technologies at Tower Group.</p><p>”Ford is perhaps the most notable, but some users within IBM’s salesforce, some at Goldman Sachs and Pioneer Investments have also made the move. Cell phone makers and service providers are making inroads into offering users more ergonomic devices, but frankly users like Ford are going to be more of the exception than the rule for some time.”</p><p>That doesn’t mean the wireless carriers aren’t actively currying favor with businesses. Cingular Wireless and Verizon Wireless have made announcements this year about new services geared to wireless users. Sprint has been ahead of the pack, offering services specifically geared to business users for nearly three years. According to Lemmer and analysts, however, more work needs to be done.</p><p>”The only thing I wish would change is just how the cellular companies treat the business community,” Lemmer says. “That is something that’s really important, to make sure the product development organizations of those companies realize that the business mentality is different from the consumer mind-set and they’re going to have different needs.”</p><p>”Nextel is probably the closest . . . with a little bit more of that business mentality,” he says. “We’re really hoping to see more of that type of collaboration now that Sprint and Nextel have come together.”</p><p>Many of Ford’s 8,000 users also use Sprint’s ReadyLink walkie-talkie service, which saps more battery life from the phones than anticipated.</p><p>”We would have liked a handset that had a longer battery life, where [users] didn’t have to plug in as often. And functions like advanced voice mail support,” he says.</p><p>Device manufacturers and service providers “typically engineer and design handsets for the consumer community,” Lemmer says. “There isn’t a mind-set for meeting the type of functions that a person in a business environment needs.”</p><p>Lemmer says Ford may still expand its wireless-only deployment to “small pockets here and there, but it really is for a user base that is very mobile and collaborative.”</p><p>The initial deployment covers Ford’s product development department, which Lemmer points out “is a user group that is very collaborative. They spend a lot of time working together and at different locations. They are constantly on the go.”</p><p>These employee characteristics might make a future deployment worthwhile. But before then, he says, there are technologies, such as seamless mobility, that he will look at before moving forward. Seamless mobility, also known as wireless-to-wireline integration, will make it easier for business users to marry landline PBX features such as four-digit dialing and a single voice-mail box for employees whether they’re using a VoIP, wireless or traditional phone.</p><p>Lemmer says he is testing products from Cisco and products through Sprint, but he does not know when he might deploy these platforms.</p><p>Other vendors in the mobile-PBX integration market are Ascendent Systems and Orative. These vendors’ products work across a variety of PBXs and mobile devices.</p></div></article> Related content news analysis Western Digital keeps HDDs relevant with major capacity boost Western Digital and rival Seagate are finding new ways to pack data onto disk platters, keeping them relevant in the age of solid-state drives (SSD). 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