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IT wants you to use Wi-Fi on your smartphone

Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010

When you look at the pace of growth in the smartphone market, since the launch of the catalytic iPhone, it’s incredible to see what has happened. The iPhone Android and Blackberry smartphones have now made their way to the consumer level comfortably. While smartphones enable us to stay connected and respond more efficiently, they have also become a crutch, which many of us rely upon to surf the web, find a restaurant, send emails, watch videos, get to our destination, instant message and of course make telephone calls.

However, for enterprises, mobile service costs have increased dramatically in recent years. The rise of the smartphone has brought a rise in data usage. Last week, John Stankey, President and CEO of AT&T stated that its mobile data usage has risen 5,000 percent over the last three years. With many companies relying on an ever-growing mobile workforce, business needs to be able to control mobile data costs that have been typically beyond their control.

With Android getting more ready for business and projected to become the number 2 Worldwide Mobile Operating System this year, according to Gartner – enterprises will be looking for approaches to secure ways to manage the costs of mobility services by offloading data usage to Wi-Fi networks.

Here are some of the strong reasons for offloading to Wi-Fi:

  • Smartphone users typically prefer Wi-Fi because of the speed at which they can interact and respond.  In our recent Mobile Workforce Report, iPass found that nearly half of workers use Wi-Fi on their smartphones, 31.8 percent because it is faster than 3G, yet only 15.6 percent because it is cheaper.
  • The quality and bandwidth provided by Wi-Fi is often better than a mobile network given there are smaller amounts of users (anyone who works in the financial district of San Francisco knows the pain of mobile networks.)
  • Enterprise smartphone users generally don’t have to view their phone bills and therefore have little knowledge about the usage and costs associated with their phone (see first bullet point).
  • From an IT administration and accounting nightmare, it’s also nice to be able to secure the devices and control costs by limiting data roaming and 3G, and prioritizing connection to lower-cost Wi-Fi networks when available.
  • International roaming and telephone costs can be drastically reduced by offloading to Wi-Fi by using softphones, IM and email. Just ask Nilofer Merchant or our own Director of Product Management, Gary!

 

 

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