Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Q&A: Nextel exec says users starting small on wireless apps

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 17:05:05 -0400

Q&A: Nextel exec says users starting small on wireless apps

By CRAIG STEDMAN
MAY 13, 2003

Greg Santoro is vice president of Internet and wireless services at Nextel Communications
Inc. in
Reston, Va. His duties include managing the rollout of corporate wireless data services
that Nextel
announced last August. Santoro yesterday spoke with Computerworld about the status of that
offering
and other issues.

How far along are you in delivering on the wireless data capabilities? The foundation is
100%
in place. We've been running a packet data network nationwide for three years, and we
continue to
augment it. Our [corporate user] support center is up and running, and we've rolled out
management
tools. One area which continues to grow is applications and services. We started out with
just a few
applications, primarily in transportation. Now we have over 50 applications that are
enterprise-class.

What's still to come? There are a couple things we're working on that I think will help
move the dial
forward. I'd like to see every [mobile] phone have GPS capabilities. And as you get more
phones with
integrated two-way messaging capabilities, like our BlackBerry service, or more phones
with large
color screens, it facilitates device interaction more than [mobile technology] does today.
Soon, you'll
also see us making announcements of phones with a bar-code scanner and a credit-card
reader.

Are the economy and tight IT budgets making it hard for you to
persuade companies to invest in wireless services? We're delivering a
consistent set of new subscribers every quarter -- 400,000 to 500,000 net
adds. And in the enterprise space, close to 40% of the customers are
signing up for a data service. It sounds funny to say it, but I think the
economy is helping us. It's real easy to get these programs going without
having to go through a long approval process. Most of the deployments
we've been involved in have started with a clearly defined project.

Are most of the projects still small in scope? Last year was lots of little
projects. This year, it's a lot of deployments within functional groups. I
expect by later this year to see location-aware services and more
enterprisewide deployments.

What about the issue of wireless security shortcomings? Is that affecting sales? I would
say
some of the black eye that wireless has on security has bled over into the more
traditional mobile
space. But it's very easy to encrypt information within a corporate environment and extend
that to the
phone -- that's basically extending a VPN to the phones. Wi-Fi, on the other hand, remains
a concern.
Our approach to the wireless LAN is to offer it as a tool on a [corporate] campus. We
don't currently
offer a hot-spot capability.

Are there other issues that corporate users say need to be addressed before they go ahead
with wireless projects? One thing that does come up from customers -- and we can prove
that it's
not an issue -- is reliability. It's inherently difficult to guarantee [service-level
agreements] on wireless
networks, and corporate customers want SLAs. But our back-end connections to the Internet
are
redundant, and we've put a lot of energy into ensuring that our data environment is
hardened and
well-secured. We've optimized everything that we can.

What about coverage? There will be places where eventually you'll get a red light in
everybody's
network. Coverage is never perfect. But we cover 198 out of the top 200 [metropolitan
area] markets in
the U.S., and 280 out of the top 300.

How do you think your IDEN mobile network stacks up against rival ones based on GSM and
CDMA technology? The biggest difference people like to talk about is speed. But frankly,
to most IT
people I've talked to, speed is a sexy thing but it turns out to be the fourth or fifth
item on their priority
lists. Coverage and the ability to deploy applications and support them are higher. When
you look at
all the dimensions, IDEN stacks up pretty well except that it happens to be somewhat
slower.

Do you have anything in the works to boost the speed? We have an option of going to an
advanced version of IDEN, which would quadruple our data rate. We're currently in the
process of
looking at that.

Why not jump right on it? Nothing's free. It's not that hard or that expensive, but
there's work to be
done. If customers were breaking down the door saying they needed higher speeds, we'd be
jumping
on it tomorrow. But they're not.

http://www.computerworld.com/mobiletopics/mobile/story/0,10801,81192,00.html?nas=PM-81192

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