Siemens’ strategy to garner more VoWLAN customers is to tweak and improve applications for wireless use, literally, one application at a time, said Luc Roy, VP of product planning at Siemens Communications, formerly with Chantry.
Roy said a thundering herd of applications has spurred Siemens’ strategy to ensure each application can run properly over the wireless network.
We can influence the roaming of applications, he said.
Siemens is doing this in various ways, to either tweak its service or the application so that it is forced to connect to the best access point in order to give users the best-available quality of service.
The company is working with mobile device operating system and driver application vendors, Roy said, but he declined to name them. It would seem reasonable to assume Siemens is working with its partners on this, which includes Intel Corp and Microsoft Corp.
Other ways Siemens tweaks VoWLAN applications are adding new configurations at a customer site and rejigging access points, he said.
So far, Siemens has tested about 50 VoWLAN applications, of which about 10% needed to be tweaked to maximize roaming capability, Roy said.
Siemens charges a small fee for this service, but it’s not how it is making money. The optimization of these vertical applications is the biggest value proposition for Siemens’ enterprise VoWLAN business, he said.
Siemens sells various VoWLAN products to enterprises, including its Mobility Manager, which sits next to an enterprise PBX and determines when a device should roam or not. It enables workers to have a single phone number, which people can reach them at, whether they are sitting at their desk or walking around the enterprise campus.
Yet it is seamless roaming and not VoWLAN that is a Holy Grail for the wireless industry.
Siemens is investing in seamless roaming and plans to be among its early champions. At the CEBit show in March, the company demonstrated its seamless roaming technology, which enabled the hand-off between WiFi and cellular networks as a user moves between them.
The company is commercializing this product and will launch it during the second half of the year, Roy said.
But seamless roaming represents a considerably smaller revenue opportunity to Siemens than on-campus VoWLAN, he said.
Most people, or about 80% of people, don’t need seamless roaming, Roy said. We don’t see a lot of business need for this.
Seamless roaming will be priority for several key vertical markets only, Roy said. Healthcare is at the front of queue, chiefly because complete wireless coverage can be vital within an emergency medical setting.
If critical patient information is being relayed to a doctor wirelessly, that connection needs to be reliable. A cellular dead zone within the hospital could be dire, and that means various healthcare operations would be willing to invest in seamless roaming and a market opportunity for Siemens, Roy said.
Manufacturing is another industry that seeks wireless roaming, for RFID and supply-chain management among other applications, as well as hospitality, Roy said.
But the notion that the general population will roam seamlessly throughout buildings and open spaces within cities, moving from WiFi to cellular, is likely far from realization, Roy said.
In large part, this is because questions about how cellular and WiFi carriers will be paid, as a call switches from one network to another, remain unanswered. And while dual-mode handsets are making their way to market, they are currently priced too high for mass market adoption.
So, while VoWLAN may not be as sexy as seamless roaming, it will remain Siemens’ bread-and-butter enterprise wireless-voice business at least for the near future, Roy said.
