The New World of
Enhanced Unified Mobile Communications

by Stefan Swanepoel

Effective communications has always been a critical element in any relationship or business transaction, and with today’s need for speed and mobility, consumers are demanding that all communication tools phones, pagers, voice mail, fax and email - be integrated into one single, unified, wireless service. That demand is echoed, and magnified, by the business needs of our industry: enhanced communications systems have always provided real estate professionals with savings of time, energy and manpower.

There is therefore no doubt that enhanced unified mobile communications (mTelecommunications) will be one of the biggest growth sectors in the ever-evolving technology industry, and an important boon to real estate professionals everywhere.

Ride the Waves

The first technology wave brought us PC’s (Personal Computers) and LAN’s (Local Area Networks) and introduced applications such as Word Processing, Contact Managers and network communication. Today, it’s almost unimaginable – but true! – to recall that most administrative work twenty years ago was conducted via typewriters, notepads and large files overstuffed with papers, and work was shared with colleagues by means of Xerox copies and interoffice mail. The first wave of communications did away with much of the paper, and made it easier to save, file, retrieve and share information.

The second wave was the Internet, which extended the LAN to the public networks. Indeed, this development is still a work in progress – with the Internet increasing in size, speed and efficiency almost daily. The third wave is the current deployment of cheaper and faster bandwidth (DSL, cable and T1), which enables the convergence of pre-existing technologies into an integrated desktop and software applications.

The fourth wave, just now beginning, is introducing the deployment of wireless high-speed bandwidth that allows us to make the desktop mobile. eMarketer's estimates that there were 666.3 million cell phones installed worldwide by the end of 2001. Europe led the pack with 259.1 million users, Asia followed with 252.1 million, the USA with 136.9 million, Latin America with 96.9 million and the Middle East and Africa with 36.7 million users. The Camel Group forecasts the global cell phone total will grow to 1.6 billion by 2006.

This fourth wave will move the Internet onto our cell phones and into our daily lives to such an extent that it will seamlessly blend with our current lifestyles and structures. Three primary drivers are making this possible: low cost bandwidth to the home and office in the form of Cable, T1 and DSL; near DSL performance on wireless laptop and palmtop devices; and the application of Mohr's law, which states that that chip density doubles every 18 months.

Assessing the Costs: Europe vs. USA

The main difference in the adoption of wireless technology across the world is the pricing structure between a regulated Europe and a deregulated USA. Europe's wire line carriers are still government owned and operated companies. Their pricing of wire line services is very high when compared to the flat rate or low cost structure of local service in the USA and therefore Europe adopted wireless faster.

Another important distinction: Europe has a policy of "the caller pays". Mobile cell users only pay for calls that they originate, not calls they receive. For example, "the caller pays" business application is a German Banking service in which the customer charges a product or service by simply giving their cell phone number to the provider of the service (eg. a cab driver). The merchant processes the charge like a credit card, and the Bank's computer sends you a text confirmation requesting your PIN.

In the USA wireless carriers do not have the billing flexibility to utilize "the caller pays" or "the content provider" pays. This limitation currently limits the extent to which we can use cell phones flexibly and universally, and has prevented the development of truly "location based services". If tapped, such applications would insure that your cell phone is always in touch with the closest antenna, thereby populating your phone with information about "shopping deals" nearby.

The Next Frontier: Wireless Networks

As a result, we are experiencing an emerging trend towards the creation of sophisticated wireless networks. At this stage there is competition and overlap as the two leading strategies, WiFi (Wireless Fidelity) and GPRS (General Packet Radio Service), follow different approaches to wireless bandwidth. WiFi refers to a wireless technology utilizing 802.11 protocols and GPRS is the leading protocol being deployed for data on the cellular network. WiFi technology was developed to provide wireless LAN’s in an office, but a new breed of "micro carrier" is utilizing this technology to provide public wireless access in so called hot spots such as StarBucks, Airports, Airline Clubs and hotel lobby’s. Nokia recently announced a wireless modem card that will connect with both the cellular data network and the 802.11 WiFi networks. The current network 802.11B standard supports 10 meg/sec bandwidth, which is roughly equivalent to the speed of a wired LAN while a new version. 802.11A will support 50 meg/sec speeds.

This compares to the current crop of GSM/GPRS (Global System for Mobile Communication) public networks that are still deployed and that hope to achieve 128/256k speeds to a public network. A traveling employee, such as a real estate agent, could have a laptop/pda utilizing 802.11 and access the network at the office, home, airport, hotel or the customer’s office without ever connecting to the traditional cellular network

Real Estate Broker's will most likely gradually migrate towards an 802.11 LAN because it is cheaper than wiring an office, and because home DSL installations will also soon be going wireless. Local cable company providers will integrate wireless LAN connection’s to hook up PC’s anywhere at home while the laptop you carry back and forth to the office will be 802.11 wireless on both ends and use GPRS cellular network in between.

Wireless Real Estate

Although the real estate industry and other "local" sales and service people will likely adopt these new technologies slowly, and over time, one company, GenuTec Business Solutions, Inc. is already pointing the way toward the future. The company has already completed development of two dynamic tools that are expected to be available to the real estate industry toward the later half of this year. Their services utilize an open and flexible communications platform, and can easily be added without any new hardware to almost any existing feature, existing telecommunication set or service, and can be offered to business users as a suite, or individual users on a menu-type offering.

One of Genutec’s leading services is an interactive website button called Connect-4-Info (www.connect4info.com) It can initiate an instant real-time phone call between a person viewing the website and a customer service or sales representative, anywhere at any time. This service can be utilized for almost any Customer Service, Call Center access, e-Marketing program, through any routing mechanism, including wireless. What this means, is that consumers while browsing any listing of any agent on any site, such as Realtor.com or HomeAdvisor, could connect directly to the listing agent with the click of one button on the website.

Another break-through product is an enhanced messaging service called AgentONE (www.agentone.net). This service will link voice, fax, voice messaging, paging, and two-way e-mail to a single phone number, allowing access from any standard telephone (PSTN), any wireless network or the Internet. That means that wherever you are, whichever company or office you work from, even if your telephone numbers change every week, the customer will still reach you.

mTelecommunications

As a result of such developments, it won’t be long before we will finally get to access our desktop and applications everywhere, anytime, and consumers will have access to us, everywhere, anytime. We will have access to corporate database servers and content providers through the public wireless network, or by utilizing a lightweight device that connects with our office PC through the public wireless network. Either way, total communications access all the time, will soon no longer be dream, but a reality.

Also beginning to emerge are a new crop of lightweight portable devices using less power, but having more memory, utilizing high volume bandwidth and integrating a high performance-computing platform with cell phones. For an initial glimpse at the future of communications, check out various new products such as the new Blackberry device with integrated cell phone HP and Psion’s no hard disk palmtops that run windows CE; MindSpring’s Treo integrating the palm interface with a keyboard and cell phone into one device, or the new updated Palm 7 that has an “always-on-data” connection.