Agito brings VoIP over Wi-Fi to BlackBerry

BlackBerry owners will be able to access a range of mid-call features

Agito Networks has expanded its mobile unified communications (UC) offering to bring VoIP over Wi-Fi to the most popular BlackBerry devices.

The development expands Agito's RoamAnywhere Mobility Router, and aims to help integrate UC into organisations' mobile devices, including Research in Motion (RIM) smartphones.

RIM dominates the enterprise smartphone market, and is proving increasingly popular in the consumer market, and Agito has been keen to get its UC technology onto the platform.

Agito acknowledged that this has not been an easy process, but said that it has released a tightly integrated application for the BlackBerry Bold 9000, and the Curve 8900, 8800 and 8300 models. A lack of Wi-Fi means that the Storm range has not been included in Agito's list.

BlackBerry users could previously access only UC and PBX functionality over the cellular network, which negated some features as well as the coverage and cost-saving benefits delivered by combining Wi-Fi.

Pejman Roshan, co-founder and vice president of marketing at Agito, explained that BlackBerry owners using the RoamAnywhere Mobility Router can now access a range of mid-call features, including hold, conferencing, transfer, single number and voicemail, directory query and call retrieve.

"The industry has been asking mobile UC vendors to deliver support for BlackBerry smartphones for years, including vendors who have been in business and trying longer than Agito Networks," he said.

"We are pleased to meet these requirements after significant investment and effort over these past two years. We look forward to further penetrating this untapped market of BlackBerry users, and expanding our ability to meet the mobil ity needs of organisations worldwide."

Boasting an automatic sub-100 millisecond handover across Wi-Fi and cellular networks, RoamAnywhere also features international direct dialling and roaming, least-cost routing, reverse dialling, automatic SIM swap, and dynamic calling rules.

The BlackBerry support is currently running as a closed beta trial, and is due to be available from mid-July.