Promoting corporate use of wide area mobile multimedia applications

Corporations have been using multimedia communications for longer than they may think as any combination of two or more modes e.g. speech and pictures, can be considered multimedia. Consumer sales of personal computers are now being promoted with the low cost availability of multimedia capabilities which now include voice and music, text, graphics and video. This capability is also being promoted into corporations through the application of videoconferencing and other multimedia applications. The imminent arrival of digital wireless bearer services which will extend these capabilities to field based workers is the main technological driver for corporate use of mobile multimedia applications. Considerable obstacles remain to be overcome if the corporate uptake of mobile multimedia applications is to occur within a reasonable timescale. In this paper a number of these obstacles is identified together with mechanisms to overcome them. Experience gained with the first digital wireless bearer service-the Global System for Mobile (GSM) communications-is used to illustrate the obstacles.