Fueling Big Business

A mobility initiative at Japan's second-largest utility improved efficiency and is saving $4million annually.

The notion of an all-wireless office is perhaps nirvana for many enterprises, but stigma has always been associated with the use of WLANs to carry a company's critical communications.

Osaka Gas Co. Ltd. In Japan, however, has debunked the notion that enterprise WLANs aren't robust enough to support the most data-intensive corporate applications. In mid-2005, Japan's second-largest utility company embarked on the world's largest deployment of a wireless office, which it successfully completed in early 2006 with 6,000 wireless IP phones across 49 offices. Osaka Gas imports natural gas in the form of liquefied natural gas and distributes it to some 6.6 million customers or about 25 percent of the total number of customers in Japan.

The company's Information and Communication Systems department launched a company-wide ?Change Out Work Style? initiative in 2005 with the goal of creating the ultimate address-free office work environment where employees could not only work on their laptops anywhere on campus but also take phone calls. The company selected California-based Meru Networks to provide a complete system that included 800 AP200 access points, 72 MC1000 controllers and 6,000 dual-mode handsets capable of supporting both WiFi connectivity and 3G cellular service from operator NTT DoCoMo.

The greatest technology obstacle in setting up the system was providing efficient WLAN configurations in nearly 50 offices throughout Japan.
Osaka Gas estimates a 50 percent savings in worker efficiency has been achieved. Employees can answer extension calls anytime, as if they were at their own desks, even when they are in other offices. Similiarly, business-critical documents stored on the central server are now accessible from anywhere. Future plans for the system involve extending the VoIP phones to handle more data services, such as corporate intranet and scheduling systems.

The idea is to eliminate the necessity for carrying laptops to customer sites or branch offices. Osaka Gas also desires to implement a solution that can locate individual employees within its 47 different branch offices.