Replacing Office Phones With Mobile Phones?

Wireless

from the could-be-pricey dept

While there have been plenty of stories about home users ditching landlines for mobile phones, and enough stories about offices switching to VoIP, here’s one of the first stories that suggests some employees prefer to use their mobile phones rather than their office landlines. While I do know a few people for whom this is true, no one had really mentioned it as a trend (in fact, the article linked here only mentions it in passing — rather than as the main point of the article). While many mobile phone plans include large buckets of minutes, using a mobile phone exclusively as an office phone could certainly end up costing quite a bit of airtime for users who are on the phone all day. If this really is true, then it could bode well for even those crippled efforts at making a combined VoIP-cellular phone that does VoIP in the office (and only in the office) and cellular elsewhere. Of course, it would limit the choices of what phones to buy — and since the new trend in selling to the enterprise is selling up through the consumer, it still may be a difficult sell. A lot of people buy their own mobile phones and have their employers reimburse, rather than taking a corporate-issued phone. Requiring a special phone would make that more difficult.