Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Colorado city switches protocols to keep vehicles on track

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 05 Aug 2004 16:19:37 -0400

08/02/04; Vol. 23 No. 21

Colorado city switches protocols to keep vehicles on track

By Joab Jackson
GCN Staff

When AT&T Wireless Services Inc. dropped its Cellular Digital Packet
Data service, the city of Aurora, Colo., faced a tough choice.

Aurora’s public works division, which relies on a wireless automated
vehicle locator for its fleet of about four dozen vehicles, had to
switch to another provider, build its own infrastructure or convert to
AT&T’s new General Packet Radio Service.

The city chose GPRS. The switch also spurred the city to make better use
of data received from the vehicles, via new software from CompassCom
Inc. of Centennial, Colo.

Using wireless modems, vehicles automatically report their Global
Positioning System coordinates over the commercial wireless network. The
whereabouts of street sweepers, de-icing tankers, snowplows and other
vehicles appear on the city’s geographic information system maps,
supplied by ESRI of Redlands, Calif.

Lynne Center, project engineer for the city of 290,000, said the
tracking system has been in place since 1998. Aurora decided against
building its own network of radio towers. The vehicle locator data could
have piggybacked on the public safety voice network, but those airwaves
were already near capacity, Center said.

Then AT&T offered to upgrade Aurora to the carrier’s Global System for
Mobile communications network using the GPRS data protocol. Dominant in
Europe and Japan, GSM only recently became available in the United
States from carriers such as AT&T and Cingular Wireless LLC.

Support for the city’s vehicle locator software was being dropped as
well. The vendor, Orbital Sciences Corp., was moving its AVL offering to
a hosted Internet service. The city did not want its vehicle location
data posted in a public forum.

“We had a feeling there might be some legal issues about who had control
and access to the data, so we wanted to maintain control,” Center said.

AT&T Wireless promised the city lower overall cost, and the average
40-Kbps throughput of GPRS is far greater than CDPD’s maximum throughput
of 19.2 Kbps, said Ritch Blasi, director of media relations for AT&T
Wireless.

Aurora’s vehicles are getting Sierra Wireless MP 750 GPS rugged wireless
modems. The city expects the entire fleet to have GPRS modems by the end
of 2004, Center said. And the automatic vehicle location system from
CompassCom has a reporting module for trend analysis.

“The reporting module will help us look at some productivity numbers,
such as miles per snowstorm or per shift,” Center said. The AVL software
will run under Microsoft Windows 2000 Server.

http://gcn.com/23_21/news/26800-1.html

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