RIM BlackBerry adds Wi-Fi access

Wednesday, May 5th, 2010 Chris Witeck, Director Product Marketing

It was announced last week that BlackBerry was adding support for Wi-Fi for the BlackBerry Mobile Voice System. In short, this allows mobile employees to have calls to their office number and extension follow them to their BlackBerry, and allow this to occur over Wi-Fi, in addition to the normal cell phone network.

Why would BlackBerry do this? I’m sure there were competitive considerations looking at the Google Android platform. More likely it was that their enterprise customers were demanding it. Unified Communications, in general, provide ability for users to maintain their ‘in office’ experience from anywhere by removing the employees’ location from the equation. You dial just one phone number or extension and reach the employee anywhere. However, the enterprise may see Unified Communication over a carrier network as costly.

Controlling enterprise mobility costs
This BlackBerry enhancement allows enterprises to manage their minutes more effectively by allowing them to prioritize Wi-Fi usage over the cell phone network. There may be instances where accessibility and quality may be better over an available Wi-Fi network than over a cell phone network.

The key question for the enterprise will be how to manage when to use the Wi-Fi network vs. when to use the cell network. The obvious choice is to prioritize the Corporate WLAN. However, Blackberry users are always on the go, and at any given time may have their devices within reach of different Wi-Fi networks, but the user may not have the time or access rights to take advantage of all of these choices.

This is where leveraging iPass on the Blackberry in conjunction with the iPass Mobile Network can provide value by providing an easy to manage and easy to use mechanism to prioritize and switch to over 140,000 Wi-Fi hotspots around the globe.

Tags: Blackberry, wi-fi access