Cable and Wireless move into mobile market

Mobile phones

Cable and Wireless is going to make its move into the mobile market, a senior executive has revealed.

In an interview with IT PRO, director of products Nigel Stevens said the teleco is working on plans to bring mobiles to its enterprise customers.

"We may not be able to compete with the likes of Vodafone but we want to offer a range of handsets to our larger customers with suitable tariffs," he said.

Although he didn't offer a timeline, Stevens did confirm that the ball was already rolling. The company is in talks with several mobile manufacturers, including BlackBerry who it already works with on fixed/mobile convergence (FMC) products.

"We are going to be manufacturer agnostic," added Stevens. "We know people want different types of phones so do not want to limit them, or us, just to one."

Stevens also said Cable and Wireless is looking to take its FMC products - allowing for unified communications between mobile, desktop and computer - down from its enterprise customers to smaller businesses through its channel partners.

"Currently we do this on a large scale of over 1,000 users," he said. "The thing is how often do you see people chatting on their mobiles in their office? Why shouldn't it be the same price as landlines for businesses with 100 users too?"

"We have the technology to move it to smaller businesses so we are going to do it," he added.

Again there was no specific date given for the availibility to the SMB market, but Stevens confirmed progress was already being made.

Jennifer Scott

Jennifer Scott is a former freelance journalist and currently political reporter for Sky News. She has a varied writing history, having started her career at Dennis Publishing, working in various roles across its business technology titles, including ITPro. Jennifer has specialised in a number of areas over the years and has produced a wealth of content for ITPro, focusing largely on data storage, networking, cloud computing, and telecommunications.

Most recently Jennifer has turned her skills to the political sphere and broadcast journalism, where she has worked for the BBC as a political reporter, before moving to Sky News.