Make way for mobile broadband

Five reasons why adopting cellular data access for laptops will be big for your business

Say you’re a salesperson making an office visit to sell a doctor on a new drug, and the doctor says, “I need a lot more information before I consider this.”

Balky Wi-Fi access and bulky brochures may not help you get it done. But if you have cellular data access via a PC Card, USB stick, or technology already embedded in the laptop, you have nothing to fear.

And the industry is already moving in this direction, as Verizon has deals in place with almost all of the major laptop OEMs, and Lenovo just announced a deal with Ericsson.

But it’s more than just what the industry is doing that suggests a transition to mobile broadband connectivity. It’s what cellular data access will do for you.

Return on investment

In the above example, the salesperson in the doctor’s office plugs in a USB stick that is both broadband cellular modem and storage device: connect, click, click, download, detach, and hand the stick over to the doctor to upload the drug specifications to the office’s computer system.

Or an insurance agent inspecting damage to a house needs more than just a handset, which is too small to comfortably depict the forms the agent must fill out. Instead, the agent uses a tablet PC.

With built-in broadband, instead of heading back to the office at 3:30 to upload the files, with a WAN card — stick or embedded — the agent can stay out in the field longer and upload the forms on site.

Performance

Verizon CDMA is moving beyond 3G EvDO (evolution, data optimized) to EvDO Rev. A, which will give users faster upload performance.

Whereas 3G provides 700Kbps download throughput, Rev. A will provide about 1.4Mbps. Upload will increase from 500Kbps to 800Kbps.

As for 4G, dubbed LTE (Long Term Evolution), you can expect it in about two years. It will dramatically increase the upload performance of data over cellular to peak speeds of tens of megabytes per second depending on the amount of spectrum available.

Price

Making it even more practical to use WAN instead of Wi-Fi are continually dropping prices for cellular data.

Mike Willsey, director of enterprise marketing at Verizon Wireless, says the basic business plan for data has gone from $79.99 per month for unlimited Web browsing to $59.99.

From a device perspective, so-called air cards were and still are in some cases $150 each. However, promotions are becoming standard, and Verizon Wireless, for example, is now offering a USB stick with storage for free.

Expectations

For better or worse, mostly for better, the evolution of high tech in business has always been driven from the bottom up. Here again in wireless, mobile phone users who have instant access to e-mail, data, and limited applications want the same capabilities on their far more expensive laptops. After all, it just doesn’t seem right that a piece of hardware that probably cost five times more than a handset should be less capable.

Web 2.0 and SaaS

We are all witnessing the end of packaged applications and the emergence of hosted Web 2.0 apps and SaaS (software as a service). As the enterprise adopts this model, again driven from the bottom up, the need for capable devices that can do serious computing while in the field makes wide-area connectivity in a laptop a must-have.

Again, Wi-Fi won’t do, and please don’t send in your comments about how WiMax is the inheritor of the wireless mantle for road warriors. In this “I need it now” world, ubiquitous or, shall we just say, national broadband WiMax is just too far away.

Unless there is a dramatic change in the direction of technology, which is always possible in high tech, I predict that in two years the enterprise will adopt cellular data for laptops in a big way.

The only caveat to this prediction that I can think of is, if Web 2.0 grows fast alongside desktop virtualization, you may not need a laptop. All you would need is a large screen, a keyboard, and WAN connectivity. Heck, you won’t even need your own operating system.