A year and a half after first announcing a planned collaboration, Motorola, Avaya, and Proxim today unveiled the platform they'll offer enterprise customers to solve mobile voice issues both inside and outside the office.

The Converged Mobility Solution, as the companies call it, consists of WLAN infrastructure equipment from Avaya and Proxim coupled with new phones from Motorola that support both GSM cellular connections and VoIP connections when in range of the corporate Wi-Fi equipment. The switch over of networks is meant to be seamless.

At the same time, the companies announced the formation of the Seamless Converged Communication Across Networks (SCCAN) Forum, a industry forum under the auspices of the IEEE Industry Standards and Technology Organization (IEEE-ISTO) that will be recruiting members to join its happy band.

During a conference call with analysts and journalists, Chris White, director of Business Development at Motorola, described the system using the scenario of an employee on the new Motorola converged phone on a train using it to make a virtual private network (VPN) connection to the office to get a number, making the call, and then walking into work while still on the phone and having the call switch from GSM to the WLAN while still talking.

The phone, the Motorola CN620 Dual-Network Mobile Office Device (MOD), has the size and shape of a cellular phone but Motorola has installed a user interface including 9-way navigation disc controller and other buttons for easy access to enterprise phone functions such as hold, mute, and speakerphone. The screen on the CN620 will use color coding to indicate when connected to the metered GSM connection ("forest green" says White) or the unlimited WLAN ("plum"). There's full WAP and HTML-based access for Web browsing, and the phones can synchronize with data stored on PCs. The phone runs on the Windows CE 4.2 operating system.

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