"Eighty percent of our business volume involves customers physically delivering, e-mailing or faxing us an order for produce that's needed within 48 hours," explains Chris Nowak, IT director. As a real-time business, the company can't afford the delays associated with extensive voice mails and callbacks and desktop-bound e-mail, he says.

The company treats the nascent Enterprise Seamless Mobility system from Motorola, Proxim and Avaya as its production telephone network, even though it is technically still a pilot project. The year-old setup facilitates phone-call handoffs between the company's Wi-Fi network and the GSM cellular network from Cingular Wireless LLC, allowing buyers and sellers to remain in continuous communication with customers and vendors.

The premises-based equipment integrates Anthony Marano's Avaya IP PBX with its wireless LAN, the cellular network and a dual-mode handset -- the Motorola CN620 -- that "speaks" both 802.11a (5-GHz) Wi-Fi and quadband GSM cellular.

Users can have a single phone number that reaches them on the campus Wi-Fi network, which extends across a space of 300,000 square feet, or on the cellular network when they are out of the office -- provided that the number called is the IP PBX number, says Nowak. The system extends phone calls, four-digit PBX dialing and phone transfers to the Cingular network; employees use browser-based Outlook Web Access on the CN620 for e-mail, he says.

John DeFeo, corporate vice president of enterprise products at Motorola, says this setup is in a half-dozen trials around the world, but Motorola has decided not to deploy the CN620 as a commercial product. Rather, the company intends to enhance the handset and related system components with unified mailboxes, presence capabilities, enterprise-class instant messaging and possibly additional Wi-Fi radio support. The next-generation system is scheduled to ship in the first half of next year, according to a company spokeswoman.