VOIP AND CELL PHONE COMPANY

Voip and Cell Phone Company

Voip and Cell Phone Company

Introduction

A recent report forecasting more than 50 percent of mobile calls using end-to-end voice over IP by 2019 should be a wake-up call for wireless carriers, who will soon be watching cell phone users slip away. For enterprises already migrating to IP PBX, the news is prompting a second look at ways to integrate its employee communications, both in the office and on-the-road.

VoIP

Simply stated, Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, describes how the Internet or other packet network can be used to carry voice conversations. (Keating,2006) More and more, people are switching from traditional phone service to VoIP for their calls. For example, IDC estimates that at the end of 2004, 600,000 households were using the service and projects that number to increase to 14 million by the end of 2008. Many people describe VoIP as a disruptive technology1 for telecommunications.(Taub,2008)

Future trends

In ancient times (the 1980s and 1990s), cell phones were rare and expensive. If a company wanted executives or sales people to have cell phones, they had to be provisioned. As phones gained more capabilities and began resembling PCs, IT departments treated them as such. Like PCs, phones were (and still are) purchases based on company criteria, and for company purposes of security, data and application access and serviceability.(Proenza,2009)

The industry has responded with all kinds of back-end solutions to facilitate corporate objectives. Companies like Palm, RIM and Microsoft and many others have developed phones, server software and other products designed to support the notion that a phone is a business tool to be provisioned and supported like a PC. (Keating,2006)

A study called "The Device Dilemma," commissioned by Good Technology and published last month, found that more than one-quarter of enterprises have already experienced "security breaches due to employees bringing unauthorized devices."

Nearly half of IT decision makers "would allow users to choose their own devices if they could be assured of security and configuration." The survey found that nearly 80% of companies saw a rise in the number of staff wanting to "bring their own devices into the workplace," the overwhelming majority of which specified iPhones.

Technology involved

IT departments should immediately get on board with the new reality about cell phones. Specifically:

* Nearly every employee carries a personal cell phone, which is increasingly likely to support Wi-Fi Internet connectivity, applications and end-user data storage.

* There is no sure way to predict what the capabilities of phones 6 months from now will acquire.

* Purchasing phones for employees is often a losing strategy. Many employees won't carry, charge, share the number for or use company cell phones.

* Supporting every major brand of user-purchased phones with backend encryption, security and data access capability is a needless cost and time-sink for many companies.

* Company data stored on phones is a risk no matter what. Phones are lost, stolen, synchronized and shared, and data residing on local storage is vulnerable.

* The psychological wall between work and personal time is ...