Slow Take-up for Bt 'always On' Service
By VNUNet.com , Jan 09 2002
BT Cellnet (to be known as O2 in the spring) has effectively spent almost £500,000 on each of its business customers that use its 'always-on' broadband mobile service.
The company, which has spent £50m investing in the networks, admitted that it now has just "over a hundred" business customers for the Active Suite corporate mobile general packet radio service (GPRS). But it could be argued to be an improvement on the 30 businesses using 500 handsets early last year.
Stuart Newstead, vice president of new business products and partnerships at BT Cellnet, accepted that take-up had been slow but said the company had always maintained that certain conditions are needed for the service to be successful.
"For these new types of services to work there needs to be three things: a good network, good handsets and devices, and good applications. In the past few months, especially with the Blackberry, we have seen these coming together in the business world," he explained.
Blackberry is the portable email device that BT licensed from US company Research in Motion last September.
"Before that it was a limited range of handsets and a limited user experience, but the Blackberry is more specialised, and email and secure intranet access are starting to come together," said Newstead.
The GPRS network gives business users always-on access to their corporate network, email services and the internet. Using a Motorola Timeport GPRS phone, the user can also access the network with a laptop.
Data transfer is faster than on GSM phones and customers are charged only for data sent and received.
The last released prices were £18,500 for the BT Cellnet installed server and software, and a choice of usage tariffs ranging from £30 to £65 per month per user.
BT Cellnet is not yet releasing take-up figures for the consumer mobile GPRS service.
Katrina Bond, principal analyst at telecoms researcher Analysys, said that operators were reluctant to promote GPRS heavily until the services and devices are more user friendly and reliable.
"A lack of devices is the most frequently cited constraint to date, and applications for mobile workers with specific requirements are still in development," she said.
thefeature.com
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