Enterprise Mobility – 3G Mobile Broadband Deployment tips
Tuesday, March 30th, 2010 Basim Jaber, Sr. Sales Engineer
I will occasionally be posting on best practices or “tales from the field on Enterprise Mobility.”
Here are some iPass 3G mobile broadband deployment tips to ensure a consistent and rapid deployment.
- We ship all 3G mobile broadband devices that we resell already activated. You, as the IT Administrator, merely need to provide the 3G mobile broadband devices to the end users.
- Customer administrators with access to the our Mobile Broadband Portal can log into the portal and associate a user’s full name and department with each 3G mobile broadband device ESN (ESN = Equipment Serial Number). That way, when we provide the month-end billing, you can see each mobile broadband device, user’s name, department, and the usage on each device. Device management is much easier when the end user’s name and department is paired with the mobile broadband ESN.
- Within the Open Mobile portal, you can also configure network policies. For example, favor Wi-Fi or favor previously connected networks and not favor 3G mobile broadband. This will ensure the 3G mobile broadband device is not constantly connected and potentially causing the end user’s data usage to meet or exceed the 5GB fair-use policy. Since our 3G mobile broadband devices do not support international roaming, you have straight cost-containment and no surprise data roaming charges.
- For example, if an iPass 3G mobile broadband users travels to Mexico or Canada, the user’s iPass Network A or iPass Network B mobile broadband device will not connect. The user’s next data connection choice is Wi-Fi which is already included in the iPass Enterprise Pro price plan.
Tags: 3G network
- Most 3G mobile broadband device vendors (OEMs = Original Equipment Manufacturers) are now providing a “driver-only” install packages which is a MSI file that lends well to a rapid deployment. iPass’ Open Mobile client is also a MSI file, meaning that you can push out the Open Mobile client and the 3G mobile broadband device driver together in a silent deployment to targeted users. Once the end users received the MSI files, they run the MSI install, plug in their mobile broadband device and let Open Mobile make the data connection. The OEM’s connection manager application (e.g. Sierra Wireless Watcher or Novatel Wireless MobiLink) is no longer needed for connecting to a 3G mobile broadband data network.
