New Wireless Products, Partnerships Geared For Seamless Mobility

Motorola on Tuesday introduced three products for its Enterprise Seamless Mobility solution, which is based on an architecture created in tandem with Avaya, Basking Ridge, N.J., and Proxim, Sunnyvale, Calif. The Motorola CN620 Mobile Office Device melds wireless LAN and cellular technologies in one handheld device, while the new Motorola Wireless Services Manager and Network Services Manager facilitate and manage the handoff from one network to another.

"What Motorola has done is create a tool that enables a person to take with them the productivity tools they have at their desk, wherever they go," said Tony Pirih, corporate vice president and director of operations at Motorola. "So that's one device, one phone number and one voice-mail."

The new Motorola products work with Session Initiation Protocol-enabled IP telephony applications and new WLAN products from Avaya, as well as voice-enabled WLAN infrastructure from Proxim.

During a Tuesday morning conference call to discuss the announcement, Motorola executives said the Motorola Mobile Office Device can connect to GSM networks, but they wouldn't name the wireless carrier slated to roll out the phone with its network service plan.

On Monday, HP announced a partnership with wireless carrier T-Mobile. Plans call for a late summer shipment of the iPaq h6315 Pocket PC, a wireless device that includes built-in GSM global phone capabilities with GPRS wireless data, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth functionality. The iPaq h6315 will be available at T-Mobile-owned stores, national retail partners, T-Mobile service providers and the HP SMB Store for $499.99 with T-Mobile network activation.

The Motorola/Avaya/Proxim mobile solution is due to ship later this year. While the HP/T-Mobile solution is focused on GSM voice and 802.11 data, it doesn't include voice-over-IP or voice-over-WLAN capabilities, Motorola executives noted.

The new Avaya WLAN products, co-developed with Proxim, were introduced Tuesday. They include the Avaya W310 WLAN Gateway and Avaya W110 WLAN Access Points which, along with Avaya's Communication Manager IP telephony software, help ground a voice-over-WLAN solution to support the Motorola CN620 Mobile Office Device. List prices for the new products, available now, are $8,995 for the W310 WLAN Gateway and $495 for the W110 Access Points. Pricing wasn't available for the new Motorola products or bundled solution.

Mickey Tsui, vice president and general manager at Avaya, said the new Avaya offerings seamlessly extend IP telephony to wireless networks. The solution would be sold through partners and Avaya's Global Services division, Tsui said.

"Partners would be involved in all aspects, including selling all of the components of the solution to doing design, implementation and management," Tsui said.