How the Nordics Killed the Desk phone

How you look at business communications will be different depending on where you are in the world.

If you’re in the in the US, you probably carry around separate devices with separate numbers and have a fixed PBX at the office. On the flip side, if you’re in certain parts of Europe it’s likely that you have one mobile phone that you use for all of your communications, both personal and business and this device acts as an extension of your company's exchange.

If you’re a part of the former, envisioning life without a desk phone may seem impossible, after all it's what you're used to and have been used to since you entered the workforce... But life without desk phones isn’t just a wild concept that's only just starting to take root, it’s a way of life that has already been implemented across an entire region...and it happened years ago.  

It may come as a surprise (or it may not if you think about where most of modern mobility was born) but the Nordics are miles ahead when it comes to business mobility, that's just a simple fact. You're probably wondering (or at least I hope you are so you read the rest of this blog) how they got to where they are now, but the answer is simple – They were the creators and early adopters of a single, life-changing technology called Mobile Extension (MEX). MEX then grew more and more dominant and led to what we know today as Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC).

But what are MEX and FMC? Why should you care? And most importantly how did these technologies lead to an isolated geography becoming one of the largest and most successful case studies for corporate mobility to ever exist? 

What Is Mobile Extension? 

We’ve already talked about what Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) is and what it’s doing for modern communications, but what about its predecessor MEX? What kind of an influence has Mobile Extension really had on business mobility? It’s simple; Pretty much any major offering that converges fixed and mobile business communications has MEX to thank (and not just because we were behind it).  

At its simplest, MEX is the precursor to FMC. It allows a mobile device to become an extension of a fixed PBX and it has given us the power to enable over 2.5 million mobile users and counting across Europe. More topically, MEX was the driving force that allowed the Nordics to kill the desk phone once and for all.  

Understanding MEX is crucial if you’re considering FMC as a solution. To start, they are incredibly similar technologies with incredibly similar end-goals. Of course, Fixed Mobile Convergence is far more adaptable towards our modern day, cloud-based needs, but MEX gave the previous generation the power to unshackle themselves from fixed communications for good and continues to do so to this day. In other words, by looking at and learning from MEX we can better see exactly where FMC is going as well as exactly what it can do for you.  

The Nordic mobility challenge 

During the meteoric rise of the mobile phone, Nordic businesses were facing an issue that continues to plague some companies today - They needed a way to remain constantly connected in a secure way without the proper means to do so. With a relatively spread out population, workers were spending a lot of their time on the move and outside the reach of their organization's infrastructure, which slowed communication and collaboration to a crawl.

This is when people started to compare their struggles to life outside of the office where people were always reachable with devices that were accessible and easy to use. At the time, this technology remained frustratingly out of reach for businesses. Deploying multiple mobile devices with multiple numbers was not only inefficient but also unreliable, unsecure and extremely expensive.

But unlike the rest of the world that saw the mobile phone as a purely social tool, the Nordics were already coming around to the notion that it should be used to communicate during the business day as well, all they needed was to take mobility to the next step. 

The mobile business solution  

So how do you solve the fact that you are working with a disconnect between your fixed PBX and a burgeoning rise in demand for mobility and reachability? It’s simple – you connect them. As the only solution capable of doing so at the time, MEX made it so that with just a single SIM, businesses could use mobile devices as a part of their exchange, enabling a whole new world of communications.  

As a native integration, we saw MEX start to become bundled with PBX offerings. This not only accelerated the rate in which European businesses adopted mobility, it accelerated the rate in which their users made the concept a part of their day to day lives - Workdays started to be described as "MEX on" and "MEX off".

From a cultural perspective, the mobile phone was seen as more of a business tool across Europe and a personal tool for the rest of the world. This led to businesses and their staff being more accepting of mobiles in a workplace setting in places such as Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark as other geographies  cemented themselves in the notion that the mobile phone was just a tool to boost their personal lives.

The results of a mobile workforce 

It took only a few years for MEX to become fully integrated into workplace functionality and culture. Almost all major PBX vendors in the region added built-in support for Mobile Extension to keep up with demand and efficiency hit an all-time high. Fast forward to today and standard mobile phones and SIMs have replaced the desk phone as well as DECT - Rolling out hardware to users has never been simpler or more cost-effective.

We were able to shape the way a nation communicated and when the dust had settled, MEX emerged as one of the most impactful technologies the sector had ever seen. 

Now FMC is picking up where MEX left off, but this time it’s not just about getting people talking in the Nordics. We’re approaching FMC with the knowledge and experience we have gained as the driving force behind MEX, and as we start to expand FMC across Europe, the USA and the rest of the world, our founding vision of a mobile-first global workforce is being realized.

We are now able to plot out the history of Fixed Mobile into three distinct stages:

• FMC 1.0, the original MEX technology which allowed basic call forwarding onto a PBX. When users left the office their calls were diverted but they had to return those calls from their mobile number.
• FMC 2.0 which replicated PBX functionality onto a softphone app
• FMC 3.0 which we have created to directly leverage a mobile phone's native dialler via multiple SIMs.

It is around FMC 3.0 that we built our newest mobile offering Dstny Converge. Converge sits between the UC and Mobile Operator to bring together the best of both worlds and open up new and exciting markets to both parties whilst adding value for existing customers.

With Dstny Converge, Communications Service Providers are able to retain customers and increase their addressable markets to include businesses who are now clamouring for mobile solutions on top of reducing margin pressure. On the other end, UCaaS Providers also massively benefit from being able to expand their proposition and rapidly get to market with an already world-leading technology.  

Are you a Service Provider who is ready to embrace mobility? Let us know.