I wrote a case study a few months ago about Hertford Regional College in England, which deployed a fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) platform to combat the cell signal blackout in its newest buildings. It wasn’t that the local wireless carrier’s coverage area or services were lacking — the rest of the campus was covered just fine. According to the director of network services at the college, some aspects of the energy-efficient building designs to improve insulation (specifically, metal in the window materials) made it nearly impossible for cellular signals to penetrate the building.

The story got our editors wondering how widespread this problem was, especially as many organizations (particularly in the public sector) are trying or required to cut energy costs with greener building designs. At the time, Google didn’t return much in terms of research or evidence — a short discussion on a wireless networking forum and another anecdote that was two years old by that point.

I tried reaching out to two well-regarded telecom analysts who track the wireless industry. One shrugged it off as a non-issue. The other said he had never heard of the problem before. Without much to go on, the story fizzled.

Then I spoke with Mark Zuber, telecommunications specialist at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, last week about his recent distributed antenna system (DAS) deployment with ADC, a network infrastructure and professional services vendor.  The college recently built a conference center and a small hotel to support its hospitality programs and provide students with experience in real-life settings. The buildings were constructed to meet energy-efficiency guidelines and, sure enough, the “low e” (or low emissivity) glass in the windows blocked cell signal. ADC designed and deployed the DAS, leaving Zuber to negotiate contracts with six wireless carriers over the next five months (ouch).

Whether or not green buildings are actually going to cause these problems on a widespread basis, it’s interesting that this has become an IT problem — namely for telephony pros, many of whom already have their hands full trying to understand how Internet Protocol (IP) and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) are turning their traditional telephony training on its head.

But as the expectation for constant mobility becomes ubiquitous (and end users rely more on cell phones for more than just phone calls), are more enterprise telephony and unified communications (UC) pros going to be running into (and expected to solve) this problem? Have you had to engineer a solution to poor cellular coverage in your buildings, green or not? Let’s hear it — and hopefully get more than two or three anecdotes on record.

(Image courtesy of shutterstock.com)

This week Agito came out with something slightly new that is targeted at a very specific, yet pricey problem faced by many companies which do international business.

Many corporate telecom and mobility managers today probably support executives who travel internationally and need to buy a temporary international roaming plan for their smartphones while on the road. These short-term voice roaming minutes are pricey. We’re talking more than $1 per minute in many cases. If you have a lot of guys on the road, this can get out of hand fast.

This week Agito announced Agito Global Enterprise, a feature in the 4.0 release of its RoamAnywhere routers and clients. This feature will automatically handover voice calls from an international cellular voice network and convert it into a VoIP call over a 3G data connection. Since most short-term international roaming plans offer relatively lower flat fees in the range of $20 or $30 for a unlimited data, this could be a huge savings for mobile employees who are traveling overseas. A $20 flat fee is a bargain compared to the $300-$400 a worker might rack up in talk time with a typical arrangement.

Late last month Pejman Roshan, founder and chief marketing officer for Agito, visited my office and gave me a demo of the cellular to VoIP handover on both a BlackBerry 9700 and an iPhone, both of which Agito also now supports as of this week. The voice quality was on par with what you might expect from either device, although there was a probably a half-second of latency in the call. Roshan attributed this to the fact that we were using a custom built demo version. The production version won’t be available until next month.

Image from Technodorm.com

Avaya’s acquisition of Nortel’s enterprise division means that a lot of enterprises are re-evaluating their voice and UC infrastructure these days. Cisco and Avaya remain at the top of the heap, but smaller players like Siemens and Mitel will undoubtedly try to take advantage of the inevitable churn that will follow Nortel’s exit from the market. For the first time in many years, Nortel customers are shopping for a new vendor. Nortel customers will be wined-and-dined at VoiceCon Orlando in a couple months, that’s for sure.

With that in mind, it’s worth looking at some highlights of what Mitel has been up to in the world of UC in recent years.

1. Last June Mitel announced a strategic collaboration with VMware to make its UC products “VMware-ready.” To date, not many companies feel comfortable with virtualizing their voice and communications infrastructure, but the desire is there. Avaya and Alcatel-Lucent are also making strong progress here.
2. Mitel has been collaborating with Sun Microsystems for a couple of years on integrating its UC applications with Sun’s Sun Ray thin client technology. By OEMing Sun Ray, Mitel offers companies the ability to mobilize employees within a corporate campus. Users can use a smart card to plug into any thin client on a campus and get full UC functionality wherever they go.
3. Last spring Mitel advanced its fixed-mobile convergence capabilities with a new “hot-desking” feature in its Series X UC application portfolio, giving it a offering comparable to leaders like Avaya and Cisco.
4. In 2007, Mitel bought Inter-Tel, a Delaware-based provider of managed network and communications services. This $700-million deal boosted Mitel’s market presence in North America significantly.

In June we reported that Agito finally managed to add BlackBerry suppoprt, expanding beyond the 40 or so Nokia Symbian and Windows Mobile devices it had already been supporting.

DiVitas, on the other hand had been quiet for awhile on the BlackBerry front, limited to Windows Mobile and Nokia E series and N series phones.

Today DiVitas announced a huge expansion of the mobile platforms it supports. It has developed a native client and a web-based client that extends its FMC technology to the iPhone, BlackBerry and Android operating systems.

Check out this PDF data sheet on the new Divitas offerings. You’ll see snapshots of what DiVitas’ FMC client looks like on each mobile platform.

Agito’s obviously not a company to rest on its laurels, as Christian Gilby, director of product marketing for Agito, quickly put together a video showing the company’s software routing a Google Voice call over a Wi-Fi network:
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/I0SD6mMGpPE" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Not shabby at all, and while the FMC and mobile unified communications fields are certainly going to get much, much more crowded over the next few years, Agito’s demonstrated they have a large head start with the technology. It’ll be interesting to see if they can keep their lead.