Jan/Feb 2005

United Utilities, which is believed to be the UK's largest "multi-utility" service supplier, has gone for "seamless roaming" in its choice of a mobile data solution for managing its field work force. The package it has adopted is the Apollo suite from Brand Communications.

The company provides water and electricity services to a large customer base, mainly in the North West.ÊIt says a key aspect of the chosen solution was that field-based workers had to be able to access mission-critical data anywhere and at any time.

The Apollo system transparently integrates GSM, GPRS, 3G and wireless networking (Wi-Fi 802.11b or WiMAX 802.16) with consumer or enterprise local-area network environments. The company says it also optimises the way it uses TCP/IP (Internet) communications.

Field engineers have been issued with Panasonic Toughbook handheld terminals, and the long-distance data transmission medium is the Orange mobile phone network. However, other forms of wireless networking are brought into play where appropriate.

 

By way of explaining how the system works in practice, the company takes the example of a mobile engineer who might be using a GPRS connection out in the field, but then loses coverage. Brand's "client" application automatically roams on to a switched circuit network (GSM) - securely and seamlessly, with no interruption to the applications or reconfiguration by the user.

The system uses a military-grade AES encrypted VPN (virtual private network), which is said to remove some of the historical concerns about deploying enterprise data over public bearers such as DSL, WLAN or GPRS.