Wireless carriers are wrestling with a variety of competing market challenges. Low customer loyalty, high cost of customer acquisition, low profit markets, costly infrastructure, and an overall difficulty differentiating services and products with competing offerings must all be addressed. As the wireless market matures, delivering ubiquitous high quality service is the key to earning both consumer and enterprise subscriptions. Carriers must move away from the commodity mindset of "selling minutes" to the consultative mindset of "selling level-of-service."

The urgency for service quality is fueled by the rapidly increasingly mobile workforce and sympathetic emergence of enterprise wireless data needs. In this new paradigm, every worker is a mobile worker. Enterprises are demanding anytime, anywhere access for their entire workforce to achieve their corporate productivity, efficiency and responsiveness objectives. Whether residing in workspaces that are rural or core urban, warehouse or high-rise, each employee needs to be accessible and prepared to respond to the business issue of the minute -- regardless of their location's attributes.

Carriers are feeling the pressure to deliver this level of service mandate because it has direct bearing on their ability to overcome the challenges mentioned above. They smell the opportunity and they feel the heat of the competition. Wi-Fi (Wireless Fidelity Transmission), which delivers low cost high-speed Internet access, has thrown down the gauntlet as a contender in the race to capture major market share of the wireless data market.

However, the carriers' major impediment to grabbing this new opportunity is their ability to cost-effectively address coverage gaps in their networks -- specific areas where service is intermittent and of low quality. These can occur in public venues (e.g., hotels, stores, airports) or inside the enterprise's facilities (i.e., in-building). The available options to cure coverage problems include: