Cisco 'discovers' seamless mobility

Stuart Corner
Friday, 15 February 2008 03:02

Opinion and Analysis

In his keynote speech at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Cisco boss John Chambers seems to have tried to upstage the leading luminaries of the global cellular industry: by presenting as new something they have been saying for years. Writing on Cisco's official blog site under the headline "Chambers redefines 'mobility' at Mobile World Congress" Matt Morgan from Cisco PR said: "It's not easy to wow a mobile phone industry audience just after they have heard from the bosses of Vodafone, Nokia and China Mobile. Yet that was the task facing [Chambers]..."

Chambers, he said, had "provided a startling vision of the future... a new phase of Internet productivity driven not by business but by consumers; the provision of everything (not just software) as a service; and emerging countries taking the lead in global innovation."

I'm not sure exactly what that was supposed to mean. Absent the ability to teleport, you can deliver only information over the Internet. And you can neither eat, wear or sit down on information. Anyhow, Morgan continued: "To prove the point, [Chambers] demonstrated a unified communications video session moving seamlessly from a desk phone to a mobile, a handheld computer and finally a home TelePresence screen - clearly not a traditional mobile device, but one that enters the Cisco mobility umbrella nevertheless."

In Cisco's view, said Chambers, 'mobility' is no longer about particular devices, technologies or services. It is about using any device to access any content over any network, with IP as the basis for all communication. According to Morgan, Chambers didn't expect everyone to go along with his vision of the future. "If you agree with everything I say today, I'll have failed miserably."

On the contrary, this is exactly what Alcatel, Lucent, Nortel, Motorola and others have been saying for years under the guise of various tag lines 'Seamless Mobility' (Motorola); 'Hyperconnectivity' (Nortel); 'User-centric Broadband' (Alcatel).