Wireless at Work: The mobile warrior has long been a staple of profit for wireless carriers, but not all of today's business customers are wearing power suits

Not long ago, wireless was really more form than function. Questions of quality and feature performance were secondary to the symbolism of wireless: A mobile phone in the hand of a business executive suggested wealth, power and status-characteristics that tended to make the average American sneer.

No longer. Today, wireless is about communications and convenience, and the much larger crop of business customers encompasses those people who once scoffed at wireless as purely a luxury tool. It is now just as common to see wireless in use at a construction site or in the hallways of a hospital as it is to see it at a board meeting or in the back of a limousine.

In the U.S., business wireless users account for one-third of total subscribers but generate more than one-half of revenues, according to research from Strategy Analytics. That growth can be attributed partly to advances in wireless technology and an overall increase in public awareness and acceptance. But it is also the result of marketing savvy.

Wireless carriers, under increasing competitive duress, have stopped just honing in on individual power users and have begun marketing their services to small and medium-sized operations, teams of workers and even whole organizations. Along the way, they have managed to transform the image of wireless into something suitable-even crucial-for everyday business communications in a wide and growing range of industries.

"It has allowed the pace of business to increase to create a competitive advantage," says Char Chase, a product manager for U.S. Cellular's BusinessLink offering. "It has crossed over from early adopter toy to everyday business tool."

Out of the office Wireless has long enabled mobility, but the stereotypical application for a cellular phone has traditionally been more along the lines of calling from the back of a car to make or break a meeting or to finalize a major business deal. Essentially, wireless served as an alternative to the office phone when the customer was traveling to and from the office.

Today's wireless carriers are trying to convince customers that every minute is a good window for wireless. Even in the stuffiest, most office-oriented careers, very few people are chained to their desks all day. They are attending staff meetings, surveying job sites, traveling between corporate campuses or checking an X-ray in the radiology lab, and they are using wireless to keep in touch while they do it (Figure 1).

And not only do a wider range of business customers need new and versatile tools to keep in touch while they maintain their business, they are also increasingly aware of what's out there.

"One of the things we're constantly amazed about is the level of sophistication of users," said Keith Adamek, product manager for the Southwest region of AT&T Wireless Services. "A lot of times customers are asking for things they've tested or seen."

It hasn't hurt carriers that in their newly competitive stances they are trying to position their services as more consumer-friendly in terms of both price and accessibility.

Those same factors are important considerations in many business environments, particularly those making wireless suitable for professions such as construction, fleet transportation and law enforcement.

"If you're going to be competitive, you have to be able to reach your employees at a moment's notice," says Ed Hitchler, chief financial officer at KEI, a consulting and contracting company for the petroleum industry. The company equips its field workers with service from PrimeCo Personal Communications. "Our employees could be out at a site and need guidance from a more senior employee," he says.

Cost and billing issues are also crucial, particularly for businesses such as KEI with multiple employees that used a variety of services from multiple providers. Consolidation has already saved KEI time and money, Hitchler says.

"I'm looking at probably a 70% reduction in the cost of mobile phones for this company," he says. "It enables us to give phones to more employees than we had in the past."

Companies with limited mobility needs are a solid fit for new personal communication services providers-PrimeCo among them-that still have network limitations when it comes to serving a broad geographical region.

"Local contractors-people who work within a defined geography-live and die by these phones," said Allen Bourne, director of direct distribution channels for PrimeCo.

By targeting services at businesses with purely local needs, these carriers avoid the bad blood that can be created when customers try to use their service outside the footprint.

"We don't try to sell to people whose needs we can't meet," Bourne says.

Several carriers even have taken steps beyond voice and added some data services to their business quivers. Aerial Communications, which primarily targets small and mid-sized business with its PCS offering, recently added a wireless data component to the mix when it introduced its Mobile Office data service.

Aerial's service can be used to send and receive faxes and e-mail, dial into corporate intranets and commercial on-line services, and transport data files, said Joan Moritz, product manager at Aerial. Customers require Aerial service, a GSM handset and a laptop computer equipped with the Mobile Office software platform.

The chief targets for the service are real estate sales, court reporting, home health care and contracting, Moritz says. For example, a builder or contractor could confirm inventory status remotely during an estimate, upping the chances of sealing a contract right there.

"The people who will really be attracted to this are the ones who have real-time needs," Moritz says.

Company teamwork The effort to expand the reach of wireless to non-traditional business users goes beyond the PCS world, even beyond the traditional cellular realm. Enhanced specialized mobile radio operators such as Nextel Communications and Southern LINC also are being seized by a range of business customer types, particularly those involving workgroups where instant communication is vital.

Both carriers' networks use Motorola's integrated dispatch enhanced network (iDEN) technology to combine two-way radio, digital cellular and alphanumeric paging functions into one service offering. A large part of Nextel's target market is what it calls the "gray collar" set-a reference to that growing niche that is neither completely corporate nor completely industrial.

"Our product is very appropriate for a lot of very specific applications, where people need to be in touch and where instant communications is very important," says Tom Kelly, vice president and chief marketing officer at Nextel. "We've added components to our product that have made it very attractive to both blue and white collar workers."

Southern LINC, a subsidiary of Atlanta-based electric utility Southern Company, primarily targets construction companies, ambulance operations, power utilities and other outfits with a high degree of internal communications that get a lot of use out of the service's one-button dispatch feature.

"It's most important that they communicate during the worst situations," says Julie Toland, director of marketing at Southern LINC. In addition, the digital cellular function provided by the iDEN platform has helped the carrier expand the offering to a new crop of customers. "It's allowed us to move non-traditional users of two-way radio service over to this technology."

Part of the appeal of the dispatch service is in pricing: Customers are billed only for time when the talk button is depressed, and both carriers bill per-second after the first minute of use. The service structure is intended for companies in which employees work in groups, particularly if they are located in different places.

"Companies can create workgroups based on their own definition," says Kelly of Nextel. "We help them create the fleets they need."

Nextel's workgroup concept is put to use by a Veteran's Administration hospital network that has locations throughout California and Nevada. The organization decided to use Nextel service in place of its aging radio system.

"We had an emergency communications system that was about 20 years old," says Ron Bryan, area emergency manager for the VA Sierra Pacific Network. "That was pretty archaic, but it did allow us to communicate between our hospitals."

As the health care network expanded to more hospitals and outpatient clinics, the organization recognized a need to replace that system and give its administrators a better source of communications. Since the VA network started using Nextel service, however, usage has expanded to include nurses in the home-based care program and even police and security workers.

"Since it's digital, there's the protection and privacy for the kind of business they transact by radio," Bryan said.

Office mates As wireless technology progresses in step with business customers' needs, more and more operators are creating hybrid solutions that combine office needs with wide area mobility. By offering services that seamlessly integrate their macro networks with in-building wireless systems and duplicate features and dialing patterns, carriers can create an even more compelling business case for business-focused wireless services (Figure 2).

U.S. Cellular recently introduced its BusinessLink offering, a wireless PBX service based on Northern Telecom's Companion product that is integrated with the carrier's cellular network. One of the system's unique features is a function that determines which channels on the macro network are not being used and allows them to be used internally by the in-building base stations. That added level of control over the spectrum reduces the chances for interference with other users on the cellular network, says Chase of U.S. Cellular.

U.S. Cellular markets BusinessLink to a wide range of industries-including technology firms, manufacturers and health care organizations-but the carrier believes there really are no limitations to the type of business the service suits.

"It's really customer need, and you can find that in a lot of vertical industries," Chase says. "It's for any time you have to be away from your phone."

Services such as BusinessLink are becoming easier for carriers to sell into businesses because customers are better educated about wireless options now than ever, Chase says.

"Two years ago they didn't have a clue what it was," she says. "Now they have a wireless team in place."

Engineering Animation, a designer of 3-D graphics for manufacturing and design software, uses the U.S. Cellular BusinessLink service in its facility. The company's projects are tightly tied to the customer, and therefore, clients need nearly constant access to project managers, says Jay Shannon, vice president of operations for Engineering Animation.

"The vast majority of a project manager's time is not spent at a desk, and people don't like leaving voice mail so many times," Shannon says.

The high-tech nature of Engineering Animation's business makes it a likely early adopter for any new, even unproven, technology. But even the higher cost of using the service pays off in terms of customer relations, he says.

"We have seen some increase in cost, but it is far outweighed by the ease of our clients being able to get ahold of us," Shannon says.

AT&T Wireless offers its business customers a solution similar to U.S. Cellular's with its Wireless Office Service, which also jibes with the PBX to provide call delivery where customers want it and flat-rate calling within a designated area.

"It gives us the flexibility to be able to go to a large operation or a single building," says AT&T's Adamek. "By basing it on our public system, we can tailor it to the size and easily graduate it up and down. It's really a macro system brought inside."

The service can either tap into the existing radio infrastructure or provide enhanced coverage through installation of supplemental in-building equipment.

"We can provide the service on a campus or in a building as it stands, or we can go in and light up areas that don't have service right now," he says, noting that the bill of extending the network into private facilities is footed by customers, not the carrier. "They do pick up the cost on that because they see the value of using the service at a flat fee," he says.

Because the service is based on AT&T's IS-136 time division multiple access service, it allows for an "alpha tag" in the handset display that lets users know whether they are in their personal calling area or out in the macro network.

Customers using the Wireless Office system are likely to see cost savings beyond the flat-rate calling plan that the scheme provides. In some applications, the service is used as a supplement, or even as a complete alternative, to traditional office telephone systems, which Adamek says represents a huge costs savings.

"We've off-loaded some of the traffic from customers' PBXs in cases where they've reached their limits," he says. "It's not that cheap to go back and upgrade a PBX."

AT&T's Wireless Office service has been deployed in a wide range of industries, including media organizations, banks, manufacturing sites, construction outfits and health care facilities. Most recently, Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas implemented the system on its campus to make its nurses, doctors, technicians and other employees more mobile. East Texas Lumber Co. also recently started using the service.

"Everything from the blue collar-or plaid collar-all the way to law firms," says Adamek.

"It's pretty easy to do cost-justification for this because it's not just a boxed solution. It's so flexible and organic that it's very cost-effective for customers."

As the newly competitive wireless era has evolved over the past few years, much attention has been focused on how responsive both incumbent and new carriers would be to creating, pricing and delivering services that would appeal to individual consumers. Along the way, however, those same carriers have learned important lessons about customer needs in general and how service customization can result in increased penetration and revenue. The result, as evidenced by these applications, is a transformation of the wireless business customer market.