Cisco pitches small cells into BYOD-heavy enterprises

With the acquisition of UK small-cell outfit Ubiquisys completed last month, The Borg's next step is to line up the channel, and to that end, it's announced a partner program to help carriers convince companies they need indoor 3G/4G cells on their campuses. The Cisco Small Cell Enterprise Select program is designed to pitch a …

[P. Lee]

I smell Fail!

If your wifi can't handle it, it's unlikely your internet connection will.

Far more usefully, corporates could run their own mobile network and the carriers will lose telephone calls without business going to the hassle and shakiness of mobiles with sip+wifi.

The only benefit I can see would be if most traffic was not for the corporate LAN. Universities perhaps, where the university wants to reduce LAN traffic by getting the telco to charge for it and not providing it themselves.

[Roland6]

Re: I smell Fail!

Many larger companies will already have dedicated lines linking their preferred mobile operator to their PBX, so for these this solution would seem to permit greater utilisation of these lines. Additionally, it means that pure mobile traffic can be kept off the WiFi/LAN and hence simplify security - an important consideration in some companies...

The commercial problem that Cisco are addressing with this proposition, in the UK and probably elsewhere, are the legal restrictions around selling 2G/3G/4G equipment that utilities licensed frequencies directly to end users. Hence they need to sell to the operators/carriers and so become their preferred supplier for this equipment. The technical problem they are addressing is that many enterprise WiFi deployments aren't really suitable for large scale deployments of voice and the handover of calls between networks is problematic and will become more of an issue if 4G mobile phone manufacturers omit the WiFi circuitry.