This USA Today report has just come to my attention. It describes how car company Ford is dumping desktop phones in favour of mobiles.
For some workers, the desktop telephone is joining the adding machine and typewriter on the list of obsolete office equipment.
In a move that other companies might soon follow, Sprint announced Monday that about 8,000 employees at Ford Motor will jettison their desktop phones and use cell phones exclusively.
Ford joins a few mostly small or midsize businesses around the nation that have gone wireless. More could be coming.
Buildings at the Ford complex will be modified with extra antennas to make sure there are no dead spots. And costs, for equipment and airtime, are expected to be about the same as for the current combination of land lines and pagers.
Arising from this are two points - the first is that it just shows how embedded the mobile phone is in our lives now that companies are doing this.
The second is that, if the costs "are expected to be about the same", then telcos will be very happy. After all, getting people to swap to proprietary mobile phone networks will means it will be much harder for people to switch to VoIP... which does offer far cheaper costs but generally needs that physical connection.
