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Dell, Telus target mobile professionals
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With mobility a fact of life for businesses these days, mobile professionals are always looking for secure and reliable Internet connections. Telus Corp. and Dell Canada Inc. have teamed up in an effort to deliver just that.
Employing Telus' Wireless High Speed Service, which operates on the EV-DO wireless standard, the exclusive agreement allows customers who buy Dell Latitude and XPS notebooks and Dell Precision mobile workstations to access Telus' network via integrated modems.
EV-DO, or Evolution-Data Optimized, is used by many mobile phone companies that use the CDMA wireless standard. The service gives customers broadband download speeds of 400 to 700Kbps.
The PC market is reaching a point where catering to the mobile professional with reliable and easy access to wireless is now a natural and essential progression, one analyst says.
"We're finally getting to that point where there's traction here and it will definitely be more of a commercial play than a consumer play," says Eddie Chan, research analyst of mobile computing at IDC Canada Ltd.
"What it breaks down to is seamless connectivity irrespective of whether it's a local area network or wide area network. Eventually we'll get to the metropolitan area network."
Peter MacNeill, senior brand manager of mobile products for Dell Canada Inc., says that "it's giving people different options on being able to connect. The value-added is now you don't have to worry about Internet access; you just need cell phone coverage."
EV-DO, is run on 3G cellular networks that support bandwidth-hungry rich media applications and video, explains Chris Langdon, vice-president of network services for Telus.
While the current Telus-Dell model runs on EV-DO's Rev 0 network, there are plans to install Rev A technology on the network that will support download speeds between 600 and 800Kbps, with a theoretical maximum download speed of 3.1Mbps....