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Business mobile connectivity Net phones

Roll up, roll up, get yer acronyms here #MAM #MDM #CoIT #BYOD #MPLS #VoIP

Being a progressive high technology company we have a department that is dedicated to coming up with new acronyms. Ok that’s not an entirely fair description of the marketing department – engineering also does it 🙂

We have been upping the ante on mobile products in the last year or so.  The mobile world is rapidly moving on from merely the selling of phones, minutes and handsets (plus BlackBerry of course which has been an added value sell for years).

Unless you have been in a cocoon for the last six months (and you might) you will have noticed CoIT (Consumerisation of IT), BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) and MDM (Mobile Device Management).  Well, out of the school of MAC (Mobile Acronym Creation) also comes MAM – consistency is the be all and end all when it comes to acronyms.

MAM, or Mobile Access Management is believe it or not going to be a huge growth area especially as we eventually move in the world of 4G and high speed mobile data connectivity. Timico is somewhat unusual as an ISP in that the company is also a mobile service provider. MAM is turning out to be a wonderful complement to our ISP services.

The bread and butter work for Timico is MPLS. We install and manage IP networks large and small for customers large and small.  The same customers then use our VoIP, our mobile services, our hosting etc etc etc.

For a long time we have sold 3G SIMs as backups for fixed data connectivity.  The solution has never been elegant but it does work. Now we have an Ethernet pipe into the O2 core network that allows us to take O2 generated data traffic and incorporate it directly into a customer’s MPLS network.

This provides big benefits to customers. A mobile data network integrated with the fixed IP network in this way is far more reliable.  It doesn’t have to come in the MPLS cloud via firewall using lots of overhead for VPN security.  You get much better data throughput and a more reliable failover in the event of something happening to the main connection.

MAM is being used in retail environments such as garage forecourts. Petrol stations usually (not always – some still use ISDN!)  use ADSL connectivity to carry credit card transactions.  These transactions never hit the open internet and have proven thus far to be very secure. The problem comes when the broadband goes down. The retailer is not happy at losing perhaps hours worth of business worst case or having to use manual card processing at the very least. In this circumstance it makes a lot of sense to have a secure mobile backup.

There are other obvious uses for MAM – rapid site deployment in the construction industry for example. Builders move in to a new site and can get the site office up and running immediately with a SIM in a router connected to the company MPLS network.

Also if you allow access to the corporate network for mobile devices, smart phones, iPads  etc  then having a SIM that sits within this network improves connectivity performance and allows you to apply corporate policies to internet access as the connection has to go through the corporate firewall – just like a BlackBerry.

That’s it for now from Acronym Central (AC?).  You heard it first on trefor.net.

Trefor Davies

By Trefor Davies

Liver of life, father of four, CTO of trefor.net, writer, poet, philosopherontap.com

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