Gee whiz… it’s faster and delivers more data

At last, com­pe­ti­tion is hot­ting up in the UK for high-speed mobile con­nec­tiv­i­ty. The mobile indus­try passed a mile­stone on August 29 when O2 and Voda­fone switched on their 4G net­works, nine months after EE fired the start­ing gun.

To the casu­al observ­er, this is a devel­op­ment aimed square­ly at con­sumers. Films, sport and music fea­ture heav­i­ly in main­stream adver­tis­ing cam­paigns, with busi­ness use get­ting less atten­tion.

But behind the scenes, these com­peti­tors are work­ing dili­gent­ly to edu­cate enter­pris­es and small-busi­ness own­ers about the poten­tial of the lat­est tech­nol­o­gy.

“We are try­ing to have a con­ver­sa­tion where cus­tomers can get their heads around the sort of changes in busi­ness out­comes that can be achieved as a result of 4G, and I think that is where it is real­ly brought to life,” says Ben Dowd, busi­ness direc­tor for O2 UK.

This sen­ti­ment is echoed by Ger­ry McQuade, head of busi­ness for EE. “Since we launched, we’ve done a lot of ‘seed­ing’ with our cus­tomers, just let­ting them try it, and they are lead­ing a lot of the think­ing. They get the high speed, they get the sto­ry around mobil­i­ty, but when it comes to how it applies to their busi­ness, they are com­ing for­ward with ideas,” he says.

Accord­ing to a recent study from Voda­fone UK, 86 per cent of busi­ness lead­ers believe 4G will improve pro­duc­tiv­i­ty by pro­vid­ing a gen­uine “in-office” expe­ri­ence wher­ev­er they are, with 41 per cent plan­ning to start using it in the next 12 months.

4G is, or at least will be, used to pow­er appli­ca­tions, falling rough­ly into two camps: gen­er­al busi­ness appli­ca­tions, which are com­mon across indus­try sec­tors, and ser­vices spe­cif­ic to ver­ti­cal mar­kets. In both cas­es, it is the abil­i­ty to pro­vide staff with faster access to large amounts of up-to-date infor­ma­tion, wher­ev­er they are, that is the fea­ture giv­ing 4G an edge over exist­ing mobile net­works.

“You can imag­ine sit­u­a­tions where the sales team pre­pares Pow­er­Point slides and the details they need before they go out to a cus­tomer, with every­thing saved on a com­put­er. There are a huge num­ber of issues with that – con­ti­nu­ity of infor­ma­tion, the secu­ri­ty risk of data held on lap­tops – where­as with 4G we can pro­vide access to that infor­ma­tion quick­ly,” says Jonathan Kini, head of enter­prise com­mer­cial mar­ket­ing at Voda­fone UK.

The abil­i­ty to pro­vide staff with faster access to large amounts of up-to-date infor­ma­tion, wher­ev­er they are, is giv­ing 4G an edge over exist­ing mobile net­works

A pop­u­lar use of 4G is to pro­vide high-speed con­nec­tiv­i­ty to remote sites with­out the deploy­ment chal­lenges asso­ci­at­ed with fixed-line ser­vices. This is prov­ing pop­u­lar with indus­try sec­tors, such as con­struc­tion, where a fast set-up is a key con­sid­er­a­tion and in sec­tors, such as pro­fes­sion­al ser­vices, where teams often work from cus­tomer sites.

And the abil­i­ty for busi­ness­es, from small and medi­um-sized enter­pris­es through to multi­na­tion­al cor­po­ra­tions, to make more use of video is also a key ben­e­fit of 4G. “What we’ve spo­ken to a lot of our cus­tomers about is how 4G can pro­vide a lot of that human con­tact through video­con­fer­enc­ing. Peo­ple feel like they can actu­al­ly be in many places at once,” says Mr Kini.

In addi­tion to per­son-to-per­son, video can also be used for remote mon­i­tor­ing and for field main­te­nance appli­ca­tions.

It is not just the pri­vate sec­tor that can ben­e­fit from the adop­tion of 4G; pub­lic ser­vices can also be mod­ernised and trans­formed, with an all-impor­tant eye on effi­cien­cy.

In the health­care sec­tor, 4G can be used to enable staff to access patient infor­ma­tion secure­ly in the field, while emer­gency crews can use video to share real-time infor­ma­tion with hos­pi­tal-based teams to improve the qual­i­ty of ser­vice deliv­ered to patients.

Video can also play an impor­tant role for the oth­er emer­gency ser­vices, for exam­ple with police able to mon­i­tor pub­lic-order issues more effec­tive­ly with a fast set-up time and fire crews able to stream infor­ma­tion to con­trol rooms to aid with sit­u­a­tion assess­ments; all the time improv­ing the safe­ty of the offi­cers in the field.

EE is work­ing with London’s Air Ambu­lance, which is using 4G to deliv­er infor­ma­tion to its var­i­ous vehi­cles and to feed infor­ma­tion back to hos­pi­tals so that the cor­rect staff are avail­able on arrival.

“It’s a real­ly inter­est­ing case, but it’s actu­al­ly a vari­a­tion of ‘how do I get real-time heavy­weight infor­ma­tion back­wards and for­ward to peo­ple out on the road, in a way that I couldn’t do with 2G or 3G’,” says Mr McQuade.

O2’s Mr Dowd is equal­ly pos­i­tive about the poten­tial ben­e­fits for the pub­lic sec­tor. “There’s quite a big dri­ve to get up to speed with the 21st cen­tu­ry. We can real­ly make a dif­fer­ence and encour­age com­pe­ti­tion in that space, so we can deliv­er bet­ter ser­vices, more cost effec­tive­ly, for the pub­lic sec­tor and UK plc,” he says.

But as much as the mar­ket for 4G is now open to com­pe­ti­tion among the oper­a­tors, there are still a num­ber of issues for enter­pris­es to take into account, not least that cov­er­age is not yet per­va­sive, with Mr Dowd tak­ing a con­ser­v­a­tive view that “4G will start to become quite big in the sec­ond half of next year”.

“I think ulti­mate­ly where we want to get to is to cre­ate ubiq­ui­tous cov­er­age, so the cus­tomer can access the ser­vices that they need, when they need them, to make their lives eas­i­er,” he says.

Vodafone’s Mr Kini notes that what­ev­er the ben­e­fits of 4G, it actu­al­ly forms part of a raft of con­nec­tiv­i­ty tools avail­able to enter­pris­es.

“It’s about what the cus­tomer wants and how they can max­imise their out­comes – being more con­nect­ed to their peo­ple, bet­ter con­nect­ed to their cus­tomers and cre­at­ing the most agile busi­ness they can,” he says.

And EE’s Mr McQuade adds that, while 4G is an impor­tant enabler for enter­pris­es, “it’s not the only thing that is chang­ing and dri­ving their think­ing”.

The con­sumeri­sa­tion of cor­po­rate IT, with smart­phones and tablets becom­ing com­mon tools through­out organ­i­sa­tions, and apps trans­form­ing the way that such devices are used, is also play­ing an impor­tant role in the trans­for­ma­tion.

“There is a ques­tion about the scale of trans­for­ma­tion it enables for busi­ness­es because there aren’t any large busi­ness­es that don’t have lega­cy sys­tems that this is going to change,” he says.

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