This blog first appeared on Best in UC.

Imagine opening up your company’s next mobile phone bill. Now, imagine that the cellular charges on that bill dropped by 80 percent, and that you can expect similar savings every month to come.

For years, the unified communications (UC) industry has struggled to create a complex handoff that can save users thousands on their phone bills. Now, ShoreTel has successfully implemented this technology in its new ShoreTel Mobility solution.

The technical execution may be complex, but the concept is simple. Smartphones can operate in two modes: Wi-Fi and cellular. In cellular mode, the phone relies on your carrier’s network to place and receive calls. In Wi-Fi mode, the phone can leverage a wireless data network for those calls. By switching to Wi-Fi, callers can lower the number of expensive cellular minutes used. Even better, then can enjoy better call quality and improved battery life.

ShoreTel Mobility solution relies on a gateway called the ShoreTel Mobility Router. This piece of hardware automatically selects the best network, whether Wi-Fi or cellular, for each call. It allows you to create policies to determine how calls should be routed, or it can be set to choose the least-costly option. A vast majority of the time, that results in calls moving to the existing Wi-Fi network, which dramatically reduced the number of cellular minutes purchased from your wireless carrier.

But the savings don’t stop there. When users are traveling away from the office, the Mobility Router still helps control costs. With the industry’s first TLS/SSL-based connection, it allows users to jump on any public Wi-Fi connection or a private connection for which they have a WEP key. That means leveraging VoIP for Wi-Fi calling from home, hotels, offices and hotspots. International roaming charges are slashed.

The handoff between cellular and Wi-Fi networks is not noticeable to users. When a salesman leaves the office for his commute home while talking on the phone, his call will automatically switch from Wi-Fi to cellular network. If he’s still on the phone when he arrives home, the call will again switch automatically, this time onto his home Wi-Fi connection.

With a one-time investment in the ShoreTel Mobility Router, companies can create 80 percent cellular call savings, plus give their workforce better call quality, reliability and battery life. But the benefits don’t stop there. In an upcoming blog, we’ll explain how the ShoreTel Mobility Solution improves productivity for team member as well.