Offline Capability Can Help Your Enterprise Mobility App Overcome Poor Broadband Coverage

By Roger Sanford, CMO, Apptricity

The world is awash in amazing new mobile technology that is changing the world before our eyes. Knowledge and information is unchained. In an era of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), work is 24/7. Business is done at a rapid pace, driven by employee enthusiasm and adoption of new devices. In the past year, mobility has entered the enterprise mainstream with vigor as cloud-based mobile solutions for asset management, supply chain, field services and other needs took root. The sweep of change cannot be overstated, and it’s exciting news for those who anticipated the mobility wave and are poised to offer solutions.

However, most of the excitement over mobility fails to account for an inconvenient truth: Broad swaths of America, especially in the rural west, still have no access to true high-speed wireless. And even in dense urban areas, "dead spots" are still not a rare phenomenon.

That's why, even in the so-called “mobility revolution,” it is so critical that enterprise mobility apps include full offline capabilities to ensure that field crews have access to critical functionality and data when bandwidth is low or nonexistent.

Without offline capability, they are dead in the water – or at the very least subject to dropped data packets, restarts, intermittent database access and other time-wasters – across nearly one fifth of the nation. Just check the data.

There’s a certain irony here: As the world becomes more dependent on cloud-based apps, it’s important that enterprises, in a way, become more independent of the cloud.

How Great Are Possibilities With Mobile?

Let’s take a step back and think about the size of opportunity at hand. A recent study from the National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) estimated the global enterprise mobility market at a whopping $140 billion by the year 2020, compounding at an annual rate of 15 percent. By 2020, enterprise mobility will make up 10-12 percent of all IT spending, the study says.

The opportunity for organizations is measured in reduced operational costs, closer relationships with customers, increased efficiency and greater market share. Enterprise mobility apps that deliver organizational transparency are the single easiest way to achieve all of the above.

Those apps today can deliver big value for vehicle-based businesses. Take for example a company engaged in oil field services. Employees can be fed real-time data on work order status, warehouse inventory or new customer requests. They can receive turn-by-turn driving directions, check the inventory of their vehicles or communicate via text to customers. Back at the office, dispatchers or bosses know the precise location of employees and the contents of every service vehicle at all times. That transparency has great value for supply chain efficiency, not to mention better customer service.

But what if there’s no wireless signal?

The Broadband Coverage Issue

According to the latest National Broadband Map, issued every six months by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, only 81 percent of the United States is covered by wireless broadband of at least 6 Mbps, a government threshold for advanced telecommunications capability.

Even where wireless broadband is advertised as available, government data suggest actual download and upload speeds are “materially lower than advertised,” perhaps by half.

Nearly three years ago, President Obama ordered the NTIA and the Federal Communications Commission to make 500 megahertz of spectrum available for fixed and mobile wireless broadband by 2020. The agencies have a 10-year plan for that, but progress so far has been slow.

Now-outgoing FAA Chairman Julius Genachowki once said his agency was “focused like a laser on the vital strategic issues around broadband.”

“The clock is ticking on our mobile future,” he said. “Demand for spectrum is rapidly outstripping supply. The networks we have today won’t be able to handle consumer and business needs.”

That was two years ago, about the time of the last government update on this subject.

What’s a Company to Do?

So where does that leave you? Sitting on the sideline isn’t an option. Businesses that don’t dive into enterprise mobility risk losing out as the competition seamlessly integrates work orders and assets across physical warehouses and service vehicles.

At least for now, however, you can’t bet your business on constant connectivity. It’s simply not there.

The best hedge is to ensure your mobility solution has closed-loop integration that ensures your field technician remains productive without a broadband connection. Even in the middle of nowhere, you should have access to all the functionality needed to get the job done. The app should save any data and push it to the cloud at the next opportunity without any effort on your part.

It doesn’t have to be true that wireless deployment is only as good as the signal you get. The right app can – and should – help you overcome the nation’s lagging broadband coverage.