Q&A: Vodafone’s Peter Kelly on the iPhone for business
Vodafone’s head of enterprise explains why the mobile operator will be the one to make the iPhone a truly business device.


That's what I mean for mobile applications for business, which haven't historically been deployed in scale. Now the timing is really right for that with devices like the Apple iPhone 3GS.
Some of your competitors have had network troubles O2 was down this weekend. What has Vodafone done differently?
We've been investing for the past few years to make sure our 2G and 3G networks are not just giving good coverage but absolutely have the depth in data capacity. Because that's the key. When you start accessing bandwidth-hungry applications, especially real-time things, the network must be reliable, it must be always on, and it must have significant bandwidth to allow you to fully explore the applications.
We just launched a product called the Vodafone Access Gateway, which is a product for 3G in a small office or a home location. If you've got a broadband connection using DSL, you can get a Vodafone Access Gateway that's going to give you five bars of3Gcoverage in that location.
That's just another example of how we take the network delivery very, very seriously. There are a lot of locations in the UK that don't have great 3G coverage, whether that's a basement flat in a large city or a small office location in parts of the country where 3G access is not great. [Here] Vodafone can supply the Vodafone Access Gateway and [you can] very quickly plug it into your DSL, you can self configure, log a number of iPhones or smartphone devices to it, and you get perfect 3G coverage.
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Freelance journalist Nicole Kobie first started writing for ITPro in 2007, with bylines in New Scientist, Wired, PC Pro and many more.
Nicole the author of a book about the history of technology, The Long History of the Future.
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