Publication Date: August 30, 1996

Keeping in Touch: Communication Issues for the Mobile Work Force

By Ken Shulman

Your mobile sales force needs instant access to inventory figures. Or you manage a delivery service and want a better way to keep track of your drivers, parcels and resources. Or you are a big city police officer and need to know whether the double-parked BMW has enough outstanding parking tickets to be towed. Whatever the business, workers in the field need rapid, accurate connections to office data – just as managers need reliable connections to their mobile staff.

It is estimated that 40 percent of American workers perform at least a part of their duties away from the office. For those road warriors equipped with laptop or notebook PCs and modems, gaining timely access to information is often as simple as plugging into a phone line and connecting to their home server or internal local area network. All of the nation's major long-distance carriers now offer Internet access. Online networks such as America Online and CompuServe provide local access numbers across the country. Some large law firms in major cities are supplying their attorneys with laptops and even ISDN lines to their homes, where they can work nights and weekends. Most hotels provide modem jacks in room phones. In the worst case, that of working out of a temporary office with a digital PBX system, the mobile worker may have to scour the premises for an analog line.

The IT industry has made substantial strides in wireless communications. Cellular modems allow mobile workers access to data networks without having to find a land-line telephone. Telecommunications companies such as NYNEX, Cellular One and Southwestern Bell are moving rapidly to make their systems more efficient and reliable for wired and wireless data transmission, and in some cases are providing hardware and software packages that combine voice and data transmission.

Still, America's mobile workers operate under a variety of conditions. Some have access to land-line telephones. Others do not. Some travel with laptop computers, cellular phones, or sophisticated paging devices. Some hit the road with a pencil and a pocketful of spare change. All of these mobile workers can choose from a wide range of products to help them keep in touch with their offices. This story continues with a brief look at three of them: cellular modems; personal data assistants; and a telephone-based "electronic assistant."

[Continue to Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3]

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Ken Shulman writes from Cambridge, Mass.

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