Editor's Blog Section

From Hanging Up column issue 42 – August-September 2009

I was very proud of my first fax machine. It didn’t do photocopying, it didn’t work on plain paper (only that good old thermal stuff), and it certainly didn’t make the tea. What it did do was send and receive faxes.

What’s more, it sent them to any other fax machine you could name: plain paper machines, thermal machines, combo units – even other people’s computers, providing they were running fax software (which many could). I never once got a message back saying “Sorry, your fax machine doesn’t send faxes compatible with ours.”

I did however come to regret leasing it rather than buying it. I seem to remember working out that I’d paid a total of about £1,300 for it over the term, whereas the retail value was only about £700. Not my most prudent purchase, you could say, though I did get the benefit of spreading the cost and avoiding an up-front payment.

By the time I’d finished paying for it, the supplier had gone bust, but as the machine was out of warranty anyway, this had little effect on me. It kept on working, and I kept on paying. Finally, at the end of the lease, the fax machine was mine all mine to keep forever. Which I did: I think it’s still under my bed.

It would have been a considerable shock, though, to find when the supplier disappeared that the machine had also stopped working. Yet that’s exactly what has been happening to some users of telematics and tracking systems supplied by companies that have gone bust.

The problem is that many suppliers use proprietary software and hardware, which may not be compatible with apparently similar equipment from others. Bear in mind that these systems nearly all rely on a Web-based third-party communications infrastructure to feed data from your vehicles to you. If your supplier isn’t there to provide it, you may find that no one else can step into the breach. You will simply have to write the equipment off and buy a completely new system.

One might ask how the industry has tolerated such a state of affairs for so long. The problem is that unlike my fax machine, most telematics systems aren’t expected to send data to the outside world – only back to the individual vehicle operator using them. And so long as the supplier is around to support the system, users won’t necessarily be aware of the lack of inbuilt standards. But failures caused by the recession have thrown sharp light on the problems this can cause.

Lack of standards also raises other potential issues. What if you want to feed additional information into your vehicle’s tracking system: axle weights, for instance? Unless your on-board black box’s protocols are open and documented, you may not be able to do it. Your supplier may well agree to configure your system to meet your requirements, but that’s not quite the point, is it? You’re in your supplier’s hands, which may not be where you want to be.

And what if you want to share tracking data with customers, suppliers or fellow-operators? Craig Sears-Black of Isotrak says this is possible even with closed proprietary systems, providing you only want to capture neutral GPS coordinates. But don’t expect to be able to share detailed operation-specific information unless you’re using an open system; not without asking your supplier to set it up for you.

The transport world has muddled along with this state of affairs for years, but that doesn’t make it right, does it? Yes, we want suppliers who offer competitive edge by adding unique features to their systems. No one wants the fiasco of the electronic tachograph, which took thirty years to emerge as a system that was outdated the day it was born.

But neither do we want dozens of incompatible systems, all talking slightly different languages. It’s hardly what communication is all about, is it?

– Tabula*

*Tabula is the Latin for keyboard.