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The race to support mobile workers: road warriors make the case for EV-DO-enabled mobility solutions.

Article Excerpt
A powerful new wireless solution that capitalizes on the speed of broadband and coverage of cellular service is giving the nation's road warriors positive proof that the battle to keep productivity up, customer satisfaction high, and costs low is on the verge of being won.

Results of a three-month pilot program testing the efficiency of CDMA2000 1xEV-DO-based enterprise solutions show that sales executives equipped with laptops and wireless modems that support the new high-speed network were able to spend more hours per week with their customers than they did before, as well as more hours connected to critical corporate applications.

While preliminary, these results indicate that many of the productivity and access issues that have dogged the nation's mobile workers may be resolved by leveraging the emerging CDMA2000 1xEV-DO or EV-DO networks. Trial participants praised the speed of EV-DO, which delivers average data speeds of hundreds of kilobits per second and peak data speeds of 2.4Mbps, and reported being able to respond to customer and colleague requests in real time, all the time.

Participants also said they could tap into their corporate networks and have access to such business-critical capabilities as video conferencing and transfer of large files in locations that had previously defied connectivity such as airports, trains, and customer offices. By eliminating the down time associated with such dead zones, participants boosted their productivity significantly, and presumably, decreased their frustration levels.

The findings have tremendous import for businesses racing to support the growing numbers of mobile workers. Research firm International Data Corporation. estimates that nearly two-thirds of the U.S. workforce--or 105 million employees--will be classified as mobile by 2007. Identifying the technological solutions that will enable these employees to work effectively and cost-efficiently has become one of the most pressing mandates of the global business community.

While the incentives to deploy wireless initiatives are compelling, the investment costs can be more than a little daunting. In an...