Nortel says a $6M voice-over-IP-over-WLAN (VoWLAN) project will save them $28M in the first year alone: The article is rightly skeptical, because Nortel appears to be estimating extremely optimistically about the curtailment of cell phone use and the quality of out-of-office WLAN-VOIP.
Nortel also seems to be blithe about the idea that a laptop only has 2 to 5 hours of battery life, while a cell phone these days can have a week of standby time and many hours of talk time coupled with a quick recharge. If you have to run your laptop to accept calls and have to leave your Wi-Fi connection on, too, you'll run out of juice quite fast.
The reporter overstates one part of the issue when he writes: We wonder if Nortel is assuming that profligate executives with huge mobile bills, will also be obedient and tech-savvy when the scheme requires them to. Typically, larger corporations purchase bulk plans, including a fixed per-minute rate, instead of individual plans for each user. Executives might be the exception, in which case they might be paying $300 to $500 per month for practically unlimited minutes, so there is a cap on the service.