BT has unveiled a new cloud-based mobile offering for businesses, which it says will help cut costs and provide better and more reliable calls.
Speaking at a media event at its BT Tower in London today, BT Business CEO Graham Sutherland revealed BT One Phone, which looks to provide a converged mobile package aimed at SMEs of between 20-250 employees.
The new offering is available in two versions, BT One Phone Office and BT One Phone Professional, with the former combining fixed-line, mobile and phone services into a single mobile offering, with the latter a customisable package for smaller organisations.
The cloud-based service will look to enable greater business agility, allowing employees to transfer calls between colleagues in different offices and continue talking whilst on the move without fear of dropped calls.
40% of businesses now have employees that work remotely, BT revealed, with 70% of businesses only choosing to use traditional desk phones as they believe they deliver higher call quality.
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Employees will connect to BT One Phone via a special SIM which allows them to connect several different contact numbers onto one phone, and when inserted, will automatically connect them to a their dedicated BT-built in-office mobile network.
Accompanying the service is a dedicated BT One Phone app, which will allow staff to set their presence information when out of the office or on holiday, as well as giving access to cloud-based data such as an internal company phone directory.
BT was keen to emphasise the quality and reliability of the service, saying that it networks will deliver "excellent indoor mobile coverage and capacity, and call quality equivalent to a landline".
The company didn’t reveal any details on pricing for either One Phone package, which were described as a "premium product", but did say that both would be priced at a "comparable level" compared to similar offerings currently on the market.
The One Phone product is a big deal for the company, with Sutherland admitting that BT Business "has not really launched anything fresh and new for years," and only currently had 1% if the current mobility market. This new announcement was therefore "a great moment for our organisation", he added, saying that mobility is "incredibly important" for BT Business.
BT is aiming to have a full inside-out network in place within the next two years, Sutherland said, adding BT One Phone to a planned MVNO launch with EE, due to take place in the next few weeks, as well as the company’s existing 5.4m UK Wi-Fi hotspots, small cell network and 4G spectrum. The company had tested One Phone with a variety of businesses after 6 months of trials across the UK.
BT Business has been a separate arm of the BT family since its spin-off in October 2013, and currently boasts over 900,000 customers across the country. The firm is responsible for many key BT products, including the 999 service, directory enquiries, and the company’s payphone network.
