Analyst: mobile in enterprise to overtake landlines: Corporate liability of mobile remains in flux

The number of mobile lines in North American enterprises will outstrip landlines within two years, according to a new forecast from Gartner.
That shift will take place as corporations move to IP-based telephony and thus have a cost-effective means to integrate mobile and fixed-line services, said analyst Phil Redman at Gartner.
The upshot: positive for smartphone sales and for in-building solutions such as distributed antenna systems, repeaters, microcells or wireless local area networks.
But Redman also cited the initial, higher cost of wireless services and the need to actively mitigate them.
“If companies get smarter about eliminating some of the costs (of the redundancy in mobile and landline overlap), I don’t think an economic downturn will impact this trend,” the analyst said. “As companies upgrade to IP telephony, they’ll take away more desk phones. Because IP telephony integrates cellular telephony, it only makes sense to support mobile users on it.”
Other cost-reduction methods for going mobile:
“One way to cut costs is to use a dual-mode device that incorporates Wi-Fi, for in-building reception,” Redman said. “Operators are offering in-building pricing called ‘zoned pricing.’ Some operators offer unlimited calling on-campus. These are customized programs, but they’re available. Some companies are consolidating their users onto one provider. Operators are offering reduced costs for mobile-to-fixed, or fixed-to-mobile, all on the same network – we call those ‘on net calls.’ That reduces the overall number of minutes that a company uses.”
Most operators do not have mature solutions in this area, yet will be rolling out more products in this space during the next two years,” Redman said.
These conclusions are based, in part, on Gartner’s finding that “in North America, most Fortune 1000 companies support the use of and pay for cellular services for their employees and have even moved from individual to corporate liability.”
But In-Stat studies on the question of who pays – corporate vs. individual liability – may contradict Gartner’s findings.
Despite a slight increase in corporate liability for mobile costs, corporate liability only slightly edges out individual liability among American corporations, In-Stat reported in May. That made In-Stat analyst Bill Hughes suspicious that corporations may push more individual liability in a downturn, Hughes said earlier this year. In-Stat found that companies that adopt corporate liability policies have more productive workers.
“The majority of companies we talk to are moving to corporate liability (for mobile phone costs),” Redman countered. “These are companies with 500 to 1,000 users or more. As they’ve had to support wireless e-mail and data services on their IT platform, they’ve become more concerned about security and device management. In some industries – financial services, for instance – it’s 100% corporate liability, because they’re regulated.”