Videoconferencing at the beach may still be a pipe dream, but the mobile workforce is here today. ZDNet Australia examines how businesses are reaping the benefits of mobility.
Until recently, years of wistful discussion about the promise of mobile computing had gotten nowhere. The versatility and portability of notebook PCs made them an instant hit with the corporate world, but they were little more than computing eunuchs without a hard-wired modem or network connection. PDAs were more portable still, but their utility was limited by their limited processing power and reliance on synchronisation with desk-bound systems.
What was missing was meaningful, inexpensive wireless connectivity to complete the mobile computing equation. But it was only last year, after a decade of building out switched-circuit mobile networks to support rabid demand for voice communications, that carriers finally gave Australian businesses a way to fulfil their mobile aspirations. That way is GPRS (General Packet Radio Service), a data transmission protocol that overlays GSM mobile networks to provide a packet-based data connection running at speeds of around 40Kbps—comparable to those of a conventional dial-up modem.
GSM on steroids
To support GPRS, GSM network operators add two pieces of equipment to their networks: a Serving GPRS Support Node (SGSN) and Gateway GPRS Support Node (GGSN). The SGSN attaches to the base station and manages individual user sessions, while the GGSN acts as the gateway between the mobile network and external networks such as the Internet and corporate LANs. Both connect with a carrier-hosted Home Location Register (HLR) to authenticate subscriber profiles and access rights. Because it’s based on data packets, GPRS supports any application written to run over IP networks. This means it’s a no-brainer for companies to use GPRS to carry secure virtual private networks (VPNs), intranet access, thin-client environments, Voice over IP (VoIP), and other common applications. GPRS also supports RADIUS (Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service), commonly used to authenticate dial-in modem users to corporate networks.
The benefits of GPRS have been widely touted—an always-on connection, charges based on data volumes instead of call length, integration with ubiquitous mobile phones—and make it clear why the protocol has been so eagerly awaited. That it is set to become the next corporate wireless data standard became clear when Telstra this year announced it will shut down its venerable DataTac network in late 2004.
Despite its improved functionality, GPRS is extremely cost effective compared with conventional GSM-based mobile data and DataTac solutions. DataTac requires expensive, proprietary equipment, while GPRS is becoming standard in all midrange and high-end mobile phones; these phones can typically be linked to a PC via Bluetooth, infrared, or a cable. Still other computing devices connect directly to the GPRS network via PC Card.
GPRS went live on Australia’s three GSM mobile networks early last year, but it is only this year—as the IT and telecommunications industries wake up from the collective hangover of the past 18 months—that businesses are coming to realise their prayers have now been answered. With that realisation is coming a steady flow of mobile applications—cautious experimentation at first, quickly leading into downright useful business applications—that are delivering more than their share of benefits.
Whenever, wherever
Many of the first GPRS applications are simply upgraded versions of systems that have been running for years using the 19.2Kbps DataTac network. Given DataTac’s limited bandwidth, it has mainly been used to transmit chunks of text—new jobs for taxi drivers, pickup instructions for couriers, and so on. But by shifting those applications to GPRS, the additional bandwidth brings mobile applications on parity with fixed-line modems.
That means field workers can surf the Web and access the corporate intranet at similar speeds as if they were sitting in a home office; better still, they can get direct access to full-fledged, graphical Windows and Unix applications using thin client software such as Citrix MetaFrame, Tarantella, or Windows Terminal Services.
GPRS is a big enough improvement over DataTac that photocopier maker Konica Australia this year decided to use GPRS to mobilise its 100-strong force of field engineers. It had previously tried to build a mobile application using DataTac, says national service manager Brett Buckingham, but that network’s spotty coverage forced Konica to shelve the project until integrator Mobile Data Communications suggested GPRS as a replacement.
Field engineers, who used to have to use customer telephones to communicate with the office, now go into the field with a wirelessly equipped HP Jornada PDA or HP XE3 notebook PC (around 60 percent of workers use PDAs, a percentage that’s growing after the theft of a number of notebooks from cars).
The wireless connectivity allows field engineers to instantly access online technical documentation and Konica’s Web-based global knowledge system; log service calls; download copier firmware updates; enter details of parts they’ve used; and perform many other tasks right from customers’ premises.
“If they’re on site it’s difficult to say ‘can I use your PC to go on the Web?’” Buckingham explains. “The GPRS has allowed our engineers to get access to our knowledge solution from the field. They can log onto the site, put in a search query and the response comes back onto their handheld or notebook. This allows them to fix the equipment faster.”
Faster access to information might save five minutes or more per service call, Buckingham estimates. Multiply that by an average of more than 6000 service calls the company makes every month, and it’s clear that its mobile investment has paid off big.
There are other savings, too: engineers used to wait for minutes on the phone until busy dispatchers could get them job information, but those details can now be sent with the push of a button. And the company now has better control over its parts inventory, thanks to engineers entering details of parts they’ve used right into the system.
Cutting the cords
As Konica found, many of the benefits of mobile computing come from intangibles such as saved time, improved data accuracy, and more efficient management of field resources. Since it’s often hard to attach metrics to such benefits, building a case for mobile computing requires you to sit down with business managers and think long and hard about what you all hope to accomplish.
Most companies will start with a smaller pilot program, in which to test user interfaces and application functionality. Although many mobile applications will be necessarily customer facing, it’s a good idea to trial the program with internal users, perhaps using simulated data sets, to work out the kinks. In many other cases, mobile computing may be best applied to internal business units first—for example, mobilising workers in a spare parts depot so they’re no longer tied to stationary PCs.
There are two ways of bringing field employees online using GPRS: either use GPRS to link field employees with a VPN running over the public Internet, or talk with your telecommunications provider about setting up a direct network connection (in which your corporate firewall is directly linked to the GPRS GGSN).
The latter approach may prove to be more secure and responsive, but it may also be more expensive because generic Internet connections benefit from economies of scale. Having said that, using the Internet for access to critical business apps requires the usual due diligence on matters such as securing private data on a public network.
When choosing an access device for mobile employees, you’ll need to conduct some extensive usability testing to compare PDAs, notebooks, and the tablet PCs due for launch in Australia early next month. Notebooks, long a corporate favourite, are understandably popular devices for mobile computing. They’re already common in most companies, can run all corporate applications unmodified, and have a low learning curve since employees are already familiar with them.
That having been said, they’re often unwieldy for specific-purpose applications; suffer poor battery life, although that’s due to improve with the introduction of better batteries next year; and lack touch-screen interactivity that’s useful for customer-facing applications. These problems may fade by next year, however, as Intel works with notebook manufacturers to push out power-efficient and wireless-ready systems based on its forthcoming Banias processor.
Notwithstanding IDC’s recent observations that PDA shipments dropped 16 percent in the second quarter of this year, PDAs are fast becoming a popular alternative to clunky notebooks. They’re easy for employees to carry with them, offer excellent battery life thanks to power-conscious processors like Intel’s XScale, and are typically built with mobile applications in mind.
Accommodating mobile form factors
Where PDAs suffer the most is in their user interface: smaller screens, the lack of a keyboard, and reliance on a pen-based interface require considerable adaptation on the part of application developers. Accommodating their very specific design previously meant forcing developers into a new mindset, sys Dr Peter Stanski, a Monash University lecturer and CEO of Melbourne-based Stanski Consulting.
“The user interface is what makes or breaks an application,” says Stanski. “A lot of people have been building desktop applications for a long time and are used to providing a rich user experience. They need to be aware that what they’ll be delivering [to a PDA] won’t be anywhere near as rich as what’s on the desktop. For many, that’s unthinkable.”
Although developers have previously had to build applications specifically to accommodate smaller client devices, many design environments and development tools are now being built with mobility in mind. For example, tools such as Peramon Technology’s theMOBILIZER, Pencel’s Kinectivity, mBrane’s eSNAPP, and TurtleWeb’s Domino EveryPlace facilitate mobile extensions to existing enterprise applications.
“There is no such thing as a killer app in the wireless space,” says George Geligiannoudis, sales and marketing manager with Wireless IP Technology, whose Connectix tool helps customers mobilise tier-two ERP systems from Great Plains, Arrow, Sybiz, and similar vendors. “There is no application that’s going to change your business and make you more profitable. The killer apps are those you’ve had in-house and spent a lot of money on; Connectix makes them more usable by giving them out into the field in a mobile environment.”
While those toolkits are built with specific applications in mind, mobilising applications will become far less remarkable as developers modernise their applications using environments such as Microsoft’s .NET, which includes a Mobile Toolkit module that allows XML-based content tagging so that applications display correctly on any size screen.
More broadly, emerging Web services standards–based on both .NET and Sun Microsystems’ competing J2EE–will encapsulate many of these mobilising technologies to seamlessly enable roaming access from all manner of client devices. Similar capabilities will become equally pervasive within third-party application servers from IBM, BEA, and other companies; with those platforms seamlessly handling the idiosyncrasies of translation of content and user interaction.
By proactively adapting applications to the reported capabilities of client devices, companies will be able to deploy a variety of devices based on their form factor and usability. This may hasten uptake of tablet PCs, which should overcome the PDA’s biggest downfall—its small screen and commensurately clunky interface—to provide what could become a popular favourite for companies with mobile workforces. Their full feature set, power economy, and simplified user interface should make them far more popular for both client-facing and employee-only applications.
On the converse, increasingly intelligent mobile phones—such as Microsoft’s long-delayed Stinger—may prove to be popular for simple data entry-type mobile applications. Either way, if developers can step away from their desktop-focused interface enough to put their user interface in the hands of .NET, Stanski says, the process of mobilising applications becomes relatively straightforward: “adding the mobility side is very trivial; we have many customers who’ve built basic systems in a day and a half. The big message is to make these systems more responsive.”
A path to the future
GPRS may have made mobile computing a real possibility, but it’s not the only technology coming down the pike. In the near future, Telstra is weighing up the possibility of deploying 1xRTT technology onto its CDMA mobile network, a move that would speed mobile data speeds to 144Kbps and, more importantly, extend these speeds to customers in rural areas where GSM coverage is spotty or non-existent.
Then there’s 3G. Undaunted by surveys showing Australian customers are apathetic to the possibilities of 3G mobile networks—a recent AT Kearney survey, for one, found just 24 percent of consumers want to upgrade to 3G—Orange continues to lead the push to deliver wireless networks that will deliver up to 2Mbps of bandwidth.
If it can win corporate customers onto the business benefits of the technology, Orange could carve out a very profitable niche for itself; Telstra and Optus have publicly confirmed they’re holding off on 3G for now until it makes more commercial sense. Their position may be more tenable in the near future, since most customers are still only now beginning to recognise the possibilities presented by GPRS.
Another potential problem for 3G is the rapidly spreading footprint of networks based on 802.11b (Wi-Fi), the de facto standard that delivers 11Mbps connections to suitably equipped devices. Wi-Fi capable equipment is flooding the market as notebooks, PDAs, and tablet PCs are increasingly designed with support for the protocol as a standard feature. Intel’s Banias chip will support both 802.11b and 802.11a, its 54Mbps cousin that’s only just beginning to appear on the streets.
Because GPRS piggybacks on the ubiquitous GSM mobile network, its coverage makes it ideal for mobile applications. Public Wi-Fi networks, on the other hand, are still relatively rare within Australia and across the world.
For the near future, that means Wi-Fi won’t be a driver of the mobile computing revolution; rather, it will remain an optional component of today’s mobile computing solutions—most valuable as a means of quickly updating software, synchronising e-mail, and downloading new data from the computer whenever a mobile employee returns to the office.
Coming standards aside, mobility is no longer something that need be talked about in the future tense. Today’s mobile technologies provide enough speed, coverage, and seamless connectivity to allow any company to benefit from their possibilities. The only thing that’s left for you to do is to figure out where mobile computing fits into your organisation—and then to make it happen.
