CANNES, France, February 23, 2004 - Today, at the 3GSM World Congress 2004, Cisco Systems®, T-Mobile and Intel announced their collaboration to show that mobility is becoming more accessible and transparent, with a cross-territory pilot to demonstrate the potential of multi-access mobile devices. The pilot will aim to show how network technologies can now work seamlessly across different applications and device platforms to give the user true, easy-to-use 'availability everywhere' mobility.
The three-month pilot will cover three countries - Germany, the UK and USA. Cisco, Intel and T-Mobile will each be contributing 30 users per country to the proof of concept. Each territory will be used to demonstrate a different facet of multi-access mobility, as follows:
- In the US, T-Mobile provides laptop users wireless LAN (WLAN) access through its HotSpot service.
- In the UK, laptop users will use a single provider - T-Mobile - but two access technologies: WLAN and GPRS (General Packet Radio Service).
- In Germany, users will test multi-access across a range of devices - laptops, MDA2 PDAs (personal digital assistants) and mobile phones - over WLAN, GPRS and GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications).
In a second phase the pilot will be extended with UMTS access and it is hoped the experience gained from the pilot will help Cisco, T-Mobile and Intel to create viable propositions that they can take to the market to enable enterprise customers to get the full potential benefit from mobility.
"We are delighted that this ground-breaking pilot has turned reality," said Martin Witt, Executive Vice President for WLAN at T-Mobile. "T-Mobile's group-wide commitment is to drive industry leadership of WLAN and provide seamless access across T-Mobile's footprint and beyond."
The multi-access pilot will showcase a number of mobility-related technologies including, from Cisco, the Cisco Mobile Exchange (CMX) and the Cisco Aironet 1200 Series Access Points. The mobile devices being used in the pilot will be based on both Intel ® Centrino TM Mobile technology and Intel Xscale ® technology.
Christian Morales, Vice President of the Sales and Marketing Group and Co-General Manager of Intel Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), said: "Intel believes that integrated solutions are a key vehicle in accelerating the convergence of computing and communications. We are very pleased at being involved in this pilot as it supports Intel's vision of making different types of technology and standards cross-compatible and invisible to the end users."
Massimo Migliuolo, Vice President of Mobile Sales Worldwide, Cisco Systems, said: "The challenges currently facing the deployment of multi-access mobile services are not to do with technology - they are simply to do with companies working together. This pilot will show that both the technological and collaborative hurdles can now be overcome - and multi-access mobility is a reality which can be easily achieved."