Inside DiVitas

Beware, Location-Aware (FMC) Part 2

By Rich Watson

In my last blog, I talked a little about the shortcomings of location-aware technology, especially as it compares with DiVitas’ more flexible environment-aware approach to seamless roaming. We’re going to continue with this topic because of some recent questions we’ve received about the differences between location-aware and environment-aware technologies. For example, we were recently asked if a location-aware solution is better for organizations that want a detailed map of their environment for management purposes.

The answer? Creating a detailed map of your WLAN is critical for reliable mobile communications (especially one based on seamless-roaming), but tying that map to the “roam” itself is not a good idea. And here are 3 reasons why:

DEAD ZONES

Location-Aware: No matter how hard you try, there will always be dead spots (i.e., no coverage) within a WLAN network. These “dead zones” result from under-coverage (by design) or geometry of the facility that can shape (or misshape) the Radio Frequency (RF) environment. Because these areas do exist within a building or on campus, the Mobile UC application must be able to accommodate for this situation in providing the best voice quality.

With location-aware roaming, dead zones become a major problem because this technology doesn’t have the intelligence to roam to cellular when a phone passes through one of these dead zones. Roams that are solely dependent upon on location-based logic will fail because, in a dead zone, the current Access Point (AP) would have no associated location-mapping and the client would assume it was within a contiguous WiFi space. In this case, the WiFi signal could go to zero without a guarantee of cellular coverage and the call would drop. By the time you enter a “dead zone”, it’s too late.

Environment-Aware: In contrast, an environment-aware solution like DiVitas responds dynamically to changes in the RF neighborhood. It constantly monitors voice quality and will automatically roam to cellular-mode if the WiFi call degrades, regardless of the user location. Dead zones are not a problem in an environment-aware solution like DiVitas; they are just a normal cause to roam to cellular.

OVERLAPPING CHANNEL CONFLICT

Location-Aware: APs often experience overlapping channel conflict - an occurrence that happens when two APs configured to the same channel are located side-by-side. When this happens they can either null each other’s signal out or induce interference, blocking communication. Again, as with dead zones, a location-based solution is not able to roam to cellular when it experiences a loss of signal so the call will drop.

Environment-Aware: In contrast, an environment-aware solution such as DiVitas detects any loss of WiFi signal or degradation of voice-over-WiFi quality. In either of these situations, it will automatically roam to cellular. This means calls won’t drop.

Antenna Sensitivity

Location-Aware: Many location-aware solutions don’t properly account for antenna sensitivity differences between devices. This means one phone may pick up a WiFi signal that another phone cannot, and the phone with the weaker signal will fail to roam to cellular. Or it might roam at an inappropriate time … like when it shouldn’t. (Spending more time in cellular means more money spent on cellular minutes). This muddies the concept of location-aware roaming because the ability to receive the signal – and place or maintain a phone call – is dependant on where a person (with a handset) is standing in the building relative to an AP, and it depends on the RF-sensitivity of the device. Performing a location service with one device may induce undesirable handover behaviors with other devices…even from the same handset vendor.

Environment-Aware: In contrast, environment-aware solutions detect any changes in signal strength, and automatically roam to cellular when a signal is lost or call quality degrades beyond acceptable.

For more information on DiVitas Networks, please visit our website at www.divitas.com

Beware problems facing Location-aware FMC

We recently received the following comment/questions (see FMC, Mobile Unified Communications & DiVitas) following one of our posts:

I recently read an article with one of your competitors claiming their technology "takes advantage of location." The implication was that other FMC vendors don’t do this and so now I’m curious to find out more on this topic. I have three questions right now that I’m hoping you can answer.

1-Does DiVitas offer location-aware services?

2-If not, why not?

3-What do you offer instead (and how is it different/better)?

I am a VoIP purchasing decision-maker at a major provider network (healthcare) and planning an FMC deployment in the near future. But I’ll confess that I’m having a hard time convincing myself this location-aware thing is really “real”, much less a deciding factor when choosing among FMC vendors.

DIVITAS RESPONDS:

By Rich Watson

Basically, a location-based service is implemented to discover the “edge” of the WiFi network coverage. Within a company facility, WiFi access points are positioned to ensure wireless accessibility while the user is inside the building (or on the campus). Once outside of a company facility (off premise), mobile communications services must rely on cellular coverage. FMC embodies the concept that allows a user to roam from a WiFi network into a cellular network without dropping the call (and in reverse). With a location-based system such handovers are triggered by a user passing beyond a marked edge Access Point.

DiVitas does not offer a location-based solution, but for a very specific reason. While the concept is appealing, location-based solutions are faced with several operations challenges in providing smoother WiFi-cellular roaming. The base presumption is that once installed, the coverage map of the WiFi doesn’t change. The building “exit” location is manually mapped regarding the near Access Point ID and signal strength at that point. As long as nothing is changed that affects the RF characteristics in that area, things are fine. However, adding new Access Points, changing transmit power, or even moving office cubicles or filing cabinets around may change the RF coverage! With any such changes, the location-based information must be manually re-configured, and it must be closely monitored and managed.

There are reasons to roam to cellular beyond just crossing the edge of the network. Any time the voice connection viability is jeopardized by RF congestion or interference, a roam to cellular should be invoked. For example, a wireless voice connection may be initiated when the signal strength is strong and congestion/interference is low. But if a high-bandwidth wireless application is launched, those RF characteristics radically change and will deteriorate the experienced voice quality. At this point, the handset should roam to cellular, even though the user is located well within the bounds of the WiFi coverage area, in order to ensure maximum call quality.

DiVitas has taken a more reliable approach to implementing cross network management: environment-aware services. DiVitas has implemented this sophisticated architecture to always ensure that the user has the very best voice quality experience by monitoring the total RF environment in order to make roam decisions. Because RF can be dynamic, irrespective of location, being able to respond to the real-time RF changes provides DiVitas a real advantage over location-based solutions and obviates any manual configurations of the location maps.

FMC lets you make a do-it-yourself hotspot

By DiVitas Chief Blogger

So it wasn’t just me. Apparently everybody at DiVitas got the “I’m high on life!” call from David today. This I learned during the afternoon blog meeting.

David is a sales guy, and he’s very animated (as sales guys tend to be). So when he’s amped up, he makes sure everybody knows about the cool thing responsible for getting him to his happy place. Today’s big event? David was able to place cheap, high-fidelity-sounding calls to us DiVitians from the comfort of his hotel room (yes, David was on vacation in St. Kitts and thousands of miles away during this flurry of phone calls. Like I said – animated …)

Today was my first time hearing about this “do-it-yourself-mobile-hotspot” trick, and I definitely plan to check it out the next time I travel. David brought a portable Linksys access point (AP) from home and simply hooked it up to the Ethernet cable in his hotel room. Voila! He created a mobile-hotspot for himself. Suddenly his laptop could be on the Internet and he could make WiFi calls using his DiVitas phone – all at the same time.

With this little setup, David was able to call everybody at DiVitas (which I think he literally did) and it didn’t cost him a cent. Because he was using WiFi, he didn’t use any mobile minutes. And he avoided those nasty international roaming fees (that can quickly off-set any coin saved on a low-season travel package.)

The bottom line: It can pay to bring your work phone on vacation (that is, if it’s DiVitas). Phoning home with DiVitas is as inexpensive as placing a call from your deskphone because you’re able to use the telephony plan your company set up for long-distance calling.

If only ET had a DiVitas phone. He would have been able to phone home more quickly (and cheaply!)

Thanks for the 6am wake-up call Gartner!

By DiVitas Chief Blogger

Our VP of marketing came to work grumpy the other day. It seems she got an unexpected 6am call on her personal mobile phone from a European Gartner Sales Rep. The guy robbed Nancy (our VPM) of an hour’s sleep and interrupted her personal time. Nancy gets to the office early, stays late and works hard … and she values her sleep. It’s easy to understand why she didn’t appreciate the work-related wake-up call. She asked the sales rep if he realized he was calling her at 6:00 a.m. No he said apologetically – he thought he was calling the east cost

To be fair, how was the poor Brit to know that Nancy didn’t work on the east coast anymore? The contact information he was using was actually for the company she worked for previously – which was headquartered in Florida. Clearly he thought it was a comfy 9am in her time zone, and safe to ring.

But the fact is this early-morning incident happened because, prior to DiVitas, Nancy’s personal mobile phone doubled as her primary business contact number. DiVitas makes you reachable by a single contact number whether you are in or away from your office – your deskphone. Folks who juggle both a mobile phone and deskphone leave it up to the caller to decide the best way to reach you. Given the choice, the safer bet is the mobile phone, since it follows you home (and you leave the deskphone on the desk). However if those callers opt for your mobile phone, and they get their time zones mixed up – as Gartner did with Nancy – the consequences are un-fun.

Coincidentally, I recently read an article lamenting this very problem, and I was really surprised that the advice was so dark ages (technology-wise). According to It’s a Wireless World , all you need to do is switch the damn Blackberry off after-hours so you won’t be bothered. The article quotes John McManus, the Commerce Department’s deputy chief information officer and CTO as complaining that mobile devices create new work/life issues. In fact, he refers to his phone as “the little demon device.”

McManus actually programs his mobile phone to turn itself off in the evening and on in the morning. In a nighttime emergency, his staff knows to reach him by using a traditional wireline phone rather than sending an e-mail message or a text message.

That sounds to me like a solution for getting some privacy, but not for solving business problems.

In any case, this wake-up call incident is, well, a wake-up call. It demonstrates why having a single contact number – like what DiVitas users have – is the best way to improve productivity while managing work/life balance.

DiVitas extends the deskphone capabilities to the mobile phone, enabling contact to be made to a DiVitas user consistently through their PBX extension. This makes reaching a DiVitas user anytime, anywhere consistent and straightforward. Now DiVitas users can place their corporate number on their business cards and be guaranteed not to miss important calls. And if that individual leaves the company – both sides win. Similar to deskphones, the company, not the individual, receives all future business calls placed to that number.

Having to juggle a Blackberry when you’re mobile, and a deskphone (with separate phone number) when you’re in-office, is far more confusing than being reachable by a single number, on a single device. Nancy used to be a multi-phone juggler – one in the office, one on her person – but not since working at DiVitas.

Nancy’s biggest challenge now? It’s not fretting about whether there was an urgent call she missed. Nope. If her phone rings after hours and the call appears to be important, she answers. If not, she doesn’t. Her challenging is simply to maintain her contact info from bygone days so she can be assured a good night’s sleep. That’s not so hard.

Is the Apple iPhone losing control?

By DiVitas Chief Blogger

Apple’s announcement this week of its iPhone enterprise play stirred up a lot of controversy. Tons of air-time was spent analyzing whether the popular-among-consumers iPhone is good enough to penetrate the corporate-mobile market forged by RIM.

Among the topics bandied about: Is the iPhone more reliable than the Blackberry (which has put users through several painful, nation-wide outages)? The answer to the reliability issue remains to be seen (but if iPhoners experience problems, I’m sure RIM will let us know).

And what about the iPhone’s new SDK? Apparently it has a major shortcoming, which is referred to by FierceMarkets as an “ominous limitation” because it “deliberately cripples third-party apps.” According to the FierceMobileEnterprise.com news site, Apple’s iPhone can only run one application at a time. This means functions – such as Instant Messaging (IM) – will be shut down when you swap to another task. Essentially you’d have to end your IM chat session to answer a call or browse the Web. Not so appealing if you are mid-IM-chat with an existing or prospective customer, right?

A stronger example of this limitation would be, let’s say, if a caller is mid SIP-VoIP call and a cellular call rolls in. The SIP call would actually die. BAD DESIGN Steve!

While these issues were interesting to read, I found a different topic regarding the consumer-centric iPhone to be also worth contemplating: Are corporate IT departments able to secure the iPhone and apply the kind of control required of a typical enterprise device?

Nope.

Apple seems to have lightly addressed some security issues, but management of these functions remain under end user (mobile worker) control. Basically, the iPhone has the same weak security-and-control services as a standard cellular phone.

In contrast, DiVitas puts all management of elements of the mobile-communications infrastructure in enterprise IT hands. This is because the brains of the DiVitas solution reside on-campus, in the corporate network. IT administrators can manage end user policy-compliance on call usage, network authentication, remote wipe (in the event of a lost device), etc. – just as they would with any mobile computer.

A consumer-centric approach, which puts that control in the end users hands, simply falls short of enterprise requirements.

The iPhone is still missing a lot of key features that you will find in an enterprise mobile solution like DiVitas. FMC is a biggie – as more dual-mode smartphones hit the market, the ability to roam transparently between WiFi and cellular will become a de facto enterprise need. Will Apple iPhone users ever be able to do that? That also remains to be seen, so we’ll save that discussion for another day.

The fact is that this week’s iPhone news is a good first enterprise-try on Apple’s part, and Apple is extremely good at making cool technology that works really well. But just as with its laptop, desktop and OS predecessors, the iPhone seems to be something that will once be more popular among consumers than businesses. Long on flash and short on substance.

NetEvents hot topic: FMC saves you money

By Gordon Young

Last month I got to do two of the things I love best. I hung out on the Mediterranean, and I talked about the benefits of DiVitas.

I was part of the DiVitas team that attended NetEvents held in Barcelona last month. This is an annual event for us where we update the European press on DiVitas news. I enjoy chatting with press, but for me, the highlight of the event was speaking on the FMC panel. The NetEvents keynote, given by British Telecom’s Rakesh Mahajan (a.k.a Rocky), centered on FMC. This topic was therefore a major topic of discussion at the event, giving the panel the momentum it needed for a lively discussion.

It was interesting having BT on the panel with me because it turned out that we are very much on the same page. At some junctions we have different methods for arguing the cost benefits of Mobile Unified Communications (DiVitas’ class of FMC). But in the end we are in agreement: Help businesses lower the bottom line.

As far as cost savings, DiVitas focuses on two benefits. One is the cost savings associated with FMC/Mobile UC due to reduced spending on mobile minutes and reduced international roaming costs. At the same time, we both (DiVitas and BT) like to highlight the productivity benefits associated with FMC/Mobile UC, which also results in cost savings. When workers are more reachable, they are more efficient and productive. And Mobile UC maximizes reachability for any employee – whether they are road warriors or corridor warriors.

It’s pretty easy to explain how Mobile UC lets companies save money on their cell bills and international roaming costs: use fewer minutes, make fewer international calls over the cellular network – save money.

It may take a bit longer to explain the productivity benefits, including how increasing reachability, efficiency and productivity can translate into money saved. But this is an easy explanation as well:

Take the healthcare industry as an example where increased productivity directly impacts the bottom line. Healthcare workers are highly mobile and they have a great need for voice and messaging access via WiFi. This is because hospitals have notoriously thick walls that render cell phones useless from inside the building. And WiFi provides an excellent mobile-network alternative.

Without Mobile UC, it can take nurses working inside a hospital up to 15 minutes to retrieve patient test results. First, nurses must find a desk phone in order to request test results. Then they must wait to be paged in order to be notified when results are ready. Once paged, they drop what they are doing and return to the desk phone to collect results.

In contrast, nurses using Mobile UC can shave as much as ten minutes off the same task. Dual-mode phones with WiFi access allows them to place a call from anywhere on the hospital campus. Here’s the math.

1) Requesting and retrieving patient results happens at least five times per day.

2) Nurses save at least 50 minutes per day.

3) In an average hospital with 800 nurses on duty per day, the result is a total savings of 650 hours per day.

BT and DiVitas agree that FMC lets you do more with less, which translates to cost savings. We just have a variety of ways of going about expressing that view point. I enjoyed being able to deliver the DiVitas viewpoint from such a fabulous location – all the while knowing I wouldn’t miss a call, thanks to my DiVitas mobile phone.

No Blackberry-like outages for DiVitas users

By DiVitas Chief Blogger

One key benefit with the DiVitas solution is that the mobile-communications infrastructure is under enterprise control. This doesn’t just mean companies maintain their own control over phone usage (call costs) and policy compliance. It means DiVitas users need not worry about getting hit by a major outage caused by, and fixed by, a third-party. This was the case earlier this month when RIM’s Blackberry users lost service for three hours.

According to a NetworkWorld article, RIM blamed upgrades to its security infrastructure as the cause of a service outage for its BlackBerry devices. About a week later, Blackberry users were out of luck (and service) again when another outage occurred.

This type of outage happened because RIM has a single point of failure, and it failed. Enterprises have BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) resident in their networks and it hot-links back to the RIM Network Operations Center (NOC). When RIM’s NOC failed, Blackberry users found themselves without email service.

This kind of outage won’t happen to DiVitas users because the DiVitas architecture puts control in the hands of the enterprise. The risk of outage is on company-by-company basis, and therefore it is much lower.

Also, if there is an outage, it’s not an all-or-nothing scenario. Let’s say a DiVitas user’s network center goes down and the company loses DiVitas server functionality or WiFi access. Users still have the cellular component of their phones to rely on. Of course all of the DiVitas features, such as Caller ID, presence, and IM won’t be available. But then again users won’t be instantly and totally cut off from all communication. They can still make calls and use email via the cellular network. In such scenarios, inbound calls from the PBX will be routed to voicemail and can be picked up over the cellular network.

For a DiVitas user to lose email access, the company’s email server would have to go down. The email server is a second point of failure, and the chances that the network center and the email server will simultaneously fail are pretty low.

From a reliability standpoint, having control over your own communications infrastructure is a far better choice than depending on a third-party.

DiVitas weighs in on RIM/Blackberry comparison

I'm taking the opportunity to respond to a recent comment to our blog. (Thanks for your comment Gary, and for raising this comparison between RIM/BlackBerry and DiVitas)

We at DiVitas are great admirers of RIM’s business model for mobilizing business users with its BlackBerry devices. RIM is able to charge a premium for its technology because it solved the major productivity problem of letting road warriors access their email when away from their offices. You’ve gotta give credit where credit is due, and RIM with its BlackBerry success is definitely due some credit.

At DiVitas, our approach is more comprehensive than RIM’s with its BlackBerry. DiVitas brings the critical voice-and-messaging component of mobile communications into the equation. Specifically, DiVitas mobilizes “business voice” in a similar way that BlackBerry mobilizes “business email.”

This is where the similarities and differences break down:

* Business email vs. Business voice, email, IM and Presence:

RIM’s BlackBerry only mobilizes email and supports carrier wireless phone services. DiVitas mobilizes the business phone (including corporate deskphone functions i.e. 4-digit dialing,  caller ID, call transfer, etc.). DiVitas also mobilizes Unified Communications (UC) applications such  as Instant Messaging (IM) and Presence.

* Cellular only vs. dual mode (WiFi and cellular):

RIM’s Blackberry runs only on a cellular network. DiVitas runs on cellular, WiFi or both (dual-mode).

* Proprietary vs. Open standards:

RIM relies on a propriety model of using its own handsets (BlackBerrys). DiVitas works with commercially available Symbian and Windows Mobile smart phones. Since today’s smart phones offer email, DiVitas customers get mobile email and voice along with mobile business phone, IM and presence in a single wireless device.

The fact is that today, a mere 5 percent of the workforce uses mobile email (according to Yankee Group and other leading research firms). These are the road warriors whose jobs require continuous communications and availability.

Another 20 percent uses mobile voice (no email), which means that a whopping 75 percent of the workforce (corridor warriors) have yet to be mobilized. We see this as a major opportunity for businesses wanting to increase availability and productivity across the board.

DiVitas can mobilize these corridor warriors, and at the least amount of cost, because they can primarily use free WiFi vs. cellular when placing and receiving calls, or sending and receiving messages. Mobilized corridor warriors will also be more available, which relates directly to increased productivity. Some of our customers have experienced ROI in less than 30 days.

It pleases us to be compared to a successful pioneer in the mobile-communications space. We are even more pleased to have the opportunity to shed some light on the differences between our two companies’ business models and technology approaches.

Rich Watson Director of Technical Marketing DiVitas Networks

FMC, Mobile Unified Communications & DiVitas

By Vivek Khuller Founder and CEO, DiVitas Networks

During the two-plus years that DiVitas Networks has been in business, there has been a tremendous amount of congestion and confusion in the FMC market. Like fans swarming for NFL quarterback Eli Manning’s autograph, literally dozens of companies have flocked into the FMC space, driven by hopes of cashing in on what was once a hot trend. The trend evolved, but a lot of vendors haven’t caught on to this fact just yet.

While DiVitas has some common ground with FMC technology, we’ve comfortably pursued a much more dynamic market. One designated by analysts as a space especially appropriate for companies that possess a balance of mobility and unified communications components.

This market space is called Mobile Unified Communications (Mobile UC). It blends mobility with key communications-applications by unifying them on a dual-mode phone, which can run on any network (cellular or WiFi).

The DiVitas Mobile UC solution allows a mobile phone to behave like a deskphone. What does this mean to DiVitas end users? They are equipped with just one phone and business number, and they are just as reachable when roaming as when seated at a desk.

True to the Unified Communications (UC) mantra used by Microsoft and other UC players, DiVitas end users are reachable by more ways than just voice. In addition to voice, the DiVitas solution unifies Instant Messaging (IM), text messaging, Presence and PBX deskphone functions (such as 4-digit dialing, call-forward and call-waiting). And it delivers these applications on a dual-mode mobile phone that can be used anywhere in the world, on any type of network.

In short, DiVitas end users have all of these Unified Communications capabilities available to him, but with the added bonus of being mobile. They can roam from the office, to a car, to a WiFi hotspot and back to the office again, and this can all be done with confidence that the DiVitas end user is reachable by the entire bevy of UC tools. Most important, the way DiVitas delivers Mobile UC is automatic and totally transparent to end users (end users most challenging task is probably remembering to keep the phone charged).

Some companies offer mobile email via cellular. Other companies offer roaming over WiFi and cellular – but it’s not seamless because you have to push a button to make it happen. These are some examples of the incomplete band-aid fixes available today, which fall short of helping businesses make their workers more mobile, reachable and productive. These vendors buzzed in with hopes of cashing in on a popular trend, only to find out that mobilizing business voice & messaging applications requires a far more comprehensive strategy.

In contrast, FMC mobility combined with UC tools, like what DiVitas offers, lets companies reach their mobile-communications Nirvana.

Carriers Need to Wake up and Smell the FMC Money

By DiVitas Chief Blogger

A few weeks ago I was surfing the Web and came across an amazingly bizarre article about how a Sprint customer passed away right around Christmas. This guy’s Sprint phone was bought at a subsidized price, and thus came with the typical two-year service contract, which Sprint insisted was still current and refused to terminate.

Given the man’s unexpected death came a just few days before Christmas, you can imagine how devastated his family must have been over his sudden death (he had adult children handling the debacle with Sprint).

Now imagine how his family reacted to the response from Sprint: sorry dude, a contract is a contract and you can’t get out of it, even if you’ve permanently stop breathing.

Reading about this family’s struggle with Sprint over the staggeringly petty issue of canceling a single consumer’s contract really struck home to me – The carriers just don’t get it. Instead of embracing the mobile-convergence market, the carriers are actually ignoring a huge opportunity in this fast-growing space. They are showing how rigid they are by sticking their heads in the sand, ignoring not only customer service but the opportunity to grow with this emerging market.

Carriers today view mobile-convergence as a threat, as something that will cause their customers to spend less money on cell minutes. What they fail to realize is that while the consumer segment is near saturation, the pool of potential business-cell minutes are practically untouched.

Even if a mobile-convergence user replaces some cell minutes with free WiFi minutes, carriers also – really – need to realize there is a large emerging business opportunity. An enterprise will buy data plans for its mobile workers once it adopts a mobile Unified Communications solution that includes a Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) component;a data plan is required for email, Instant Messaging and Presence.

Cha-ching! See? Mobile-convergence users will actually spend more money on carrier services in the long run.

Ironically, for all of the fuss, there’s really no great sacrifice or effort for carriers when it comes to getting behind the mobile-convergence movement. It basically means they need to encourage handset manufacturers to offer a wider variety of dual-mode handsets models. And they need to encourage manufacturers to innovate in technology areas such as improving battery life and WiFi performance, on devices that have been built so far.

It also means unlocking phones so that they are not tied to your proprietary cellular network.

On this matter, it seems that Verizon is one carrier that started to see the light. In November, the company announced this year it would open its network to “any apps, any device.” I say bully for you!

According to The New York Times, which printed an article on the Verizon announcement, “…Verizon will offer two flavors of service: its traditional bundle, which typically includes a subsidy for phone purchase and various other features, and a “bring your own” device service, which will be open to any device that meets “minimum technical standards.”

Verizon has not yet 100 percent crystallized details of these plans for public consumption, and there may be a downside for using a non-Verizon certified phone. Nonetheless, it’s a step that should help spur a very positive trend among carriers. If this is the beginning of a trend, this is good news for companies like DiVitas and, moreover, our users. This is because we should see more innovation in the area of dual-mode handsets.

And under this unlocked scenario, a family of Verizon users wouldn’t necessarily get stuck paying for a 2-year contract in the event of sudden personal catastrophe.

Frankly speaking, carries should just stop haggling for one minute over a few measly bucks, and instead put their energy into the mobile-convergence movement for business. They just might find themselves with some great money-making opportunities.

I think it’s called keeping “your eye on the enterprise prize.”