Service Provider as a Partner
Observers believe that any mobile deployment in an enterprise cannot succeed, at least initially, independent of the mobile
service provider (remember, it is mobile that we are talking about, not
wireless). That being the case, the success of your mobile strategy will depend
a lot on the capability and service offering of your service provider. And
remember, at this stage of the market, most of the mobile service providers are
not interested in going out of their way to help you in building your virtual
mobile infrastructure. Most of them are in the topline growth phase and are
looking at expanding subscriber base, and if anything, in creating B2C content
applications for driving ARPU. This has only been accelerated after Reliance’s
entry.
That means the onus of getting the best out of service
providers lies completely with you. The good news is that, today, apart from SMS,
GPRS is available to run your data applications. The bad news is that you have
to push them if you want to deploy any new technology. You have to work with
vendors, integrators and application developers and push your service provider
to provide what you want—a good throughput, connectivity at places where you
need it, and reliability. Because once you start using critical applications on
mobile, reliability is going to be extremely important, especially for
customer-oriented applications.
Next Page : Selection of Service Providers
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