In roughly the last decade, Bell Atlantic and GTE formed Verizon, SBC and Bell South formed Cingular, Sprint bought Nextel, AT&T bought Cingular, and Verizon bought Alltel and now AT&T has purchased T Mobile this past week for $39 billion. The link below talks about that purchase.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/20/atandt-agrees-to-buy-t-mobile-from-deutsche-telekom/
If ever an industry was changing, the cell phone market is it. Keeping up with the different platforms, as well as knowing which changes will affect your business is a difficult task. Choosing your carrier can be just as confusing as choosing the device itself. Should you choose Sprint, or Verizon or AT&T? Should you choose an iPhone, a Blackberry, or an Android? The answer depends of course of what the coverage maps look like in your area and also what your business is looking to get out of the technology.
For many construction and engineering companies, push-to-talk technology has been very popular. Sprint will be expanding its push-to-talk technology into its CDMA network, rather than just its iDEN network. The following link describes Sprint’s position in more detail.
http://www.bgr.com/2011/03/16/sprint-to-sunset-iden-network-in-2013-moving-all-push-to-talk-services-to-cdma/
For those of you who value the synchronization of Microsoft Exchange calendars, emails and tasks, Blackberry has been a popular choice. Frankly, Blackberry has struggled to keep pace with some of its competitors, Android and the iPhone in particular. In a boost to RIM forecasts, Microsoft has announced that they will be making the hosted version of BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server) free of charge to their BPOS customers and for Office 365 customers later this year. That seamless integration will make Blackberry devices an attractive choice for these cloud users.
http://community.office365.com/enus/office365/b/microsoft_office_365_blog/archive/2011/03/16/office-365-and-blackberry.aspx
No one platform is a perfect fit for everyone. Your business must weigh its unique needs to the available solutions in this market. In addition to reviewing coverage areas and device costs, some of the next questions to ask yourself include: What type of information does your business need to be mobile accessible? What investments has your business already made in mobile infrastructure? What existing infrastructure does your business have that will communicate with the mobile devices? These are just some of the considerations that go into making that decision.
Need help? Call Colden Company Inc. today and let us help advise your business. We can be reached at (888) 600-4560, at support@coldencompany.com, or on twitter – @coldenco.