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Muni Wireless - Atlanta - What a show! |
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Written by Ken DiPietro
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Friday, 10 March 2006 |
I have to admit that from my experience I have found that whenever I set my expectations too high I usually disappoint myself. From the moment I made arrangements to attend the recent Muni Wireless Event in Atlanta the excitement continued to build to a point where I was sure the show could never live up to all I was expecting.
And was I ever wrong.
One can never guess what combination of circumstances will cause any event to go from good to outstanding. While the list of speakers was as good as it can get and the sessions were also among the best I have ever attended the reality is it was the attendees that Esme (and crew) attracted that sent this show over the top. I can't remember any time that I have met such a diverse group from all over the world that shared so much information for the benefit of us all. In particular the session hosted by Sascha Meinrath and Dewayne Hendricks about the issues facing the Joburg project with the cost of bandwidth being so high that it is literally cheaper to fly to Singapore with a 1GB thumb drive, download a gig of data and fly back to South Africa than to download it locally made a lasting impression on everyone who attended.
One a more personal note, if I were to ever be appointed ruler of the known universe I would make that kind of monopoly abuse a serious crime.
But there was far more going on behind the scenes. I got to hang out with the Motorola engineers by showing up an hour early for the show. (By the way, that is a really good technique for anyone interested in having some candid discussions with people working the show.) As they were setting up the Mesh equipment I got to watch how it all fits together and got a serious demonstration of their 4.9GHz camera - and what a camera.
From inside a room, behind some lightly tinted glass we remotely controlled the camera directing it to zoom in on a magazine that someone was reading down a level in the lobby and perhaps 200 feet away. The clarity was so good I would read the print on the magazine without my glasses - something I can't do when it's right in from of me. Even better, the camera does this is 30FPS!
While this demonstration was going on I was introduced to Mitchell Weinzetl, Chief of Police for Buffalo, MN. Mitch has a Motorola Mesh installed that he has leveraged along with a custom designed application to make his department significantly more efficient. I was fascinated to hear what real and measurable changes this infrastructure has brought to his department and his community. As an easily understood improvement we can all relate to Mitch tells me that when his department was using the paper method for issuing tickets the average time to write out the ticket used to run about eight minutes. Mitch assures me that time is accurate as over the years he has personally written out thousands of tickets and he has timed them on many occasions. Now, with the help of his network an officer can call up the application on their mobile computer, enters the information (most fields are now drop down boxes) save and prints out the citation - total time, four minutes!
But that is not where the savings ends. In the olden days (you know, like last year) the handwritten ticket would then be handed over to a data entry clerk who would type in the data into the police department's computer. Then the citation would be sent over to the court so someone else could have the pleasure of typing in the same information all over again. Even then this piece of paper had to then travel over to the prosecuting attorney's office for yet another round of data entry and at each step there was yet another opportunity for something to be incorrectly entered.
I won't even go into all the other functions Mitch has automated but I will say this is the kind of innovation we all need to get behind. If you are interested, here's a short article that provides a little more data on how using a wireless network is saving time for our police as well as making things a lot safer in an already too dangerous field.
Mitch, awesome job, I commend you.
Tough to outdo that but it seems the city of Corpus Christi, Texas did something amazing by automating their meter readings. Jeffrey King (Northrop Grumman) gave a talk describing how this came to be. It seems there was a near deadly attack by three pit bulls on a meter reader a few years back and the city made a determination that they needed to find a way of getting their employees out of harm's way.
Enter Northrop Grumman and their AMR (Automated Meter Reading) technology. What had been done up to this point was for RF transmitters to be installed on to the meters which would allow for the meter to be read from the front of the house instead of having to walk around back. While this certainly reduced both time and risk it still meant that a truck and a person would have to be sent out to every neighborhood once a month to collect the data. When you look at this from the broader perspective it is not only expensive but it also is inefficient. If you are on a monthly schedule issues like a leak might not be discovered for as long as six weeks in some cases. The problem is that if Corpus Christi decided to put in a fixed collection network for these meter reading radios while they would be able to collect the data at will they would only receive that benefit from the deployment.
After some research an idea was formulated to deploy a WiFi based network that would allow for not only the collection of data at will but also provide connectivity to the entire community. Even better, a case was built showing that the investment in the WiFi network could be 100% justified by the money saved from automating the meter readings. I would suggest we really need to hand it to Corpus Christi and Northrup Grumman for using a combination of innovative thinking and technical knowhow to make this outcome. And to give you an idea of what a meter reader goes through doing their job just imagine how much fun it is to dodge a rattlesnake when you're trying to get the number off of a water meter in someone's backyard that is buried in a pit. I wonder what the turnover rate for a job like that is.
Way to go Corpus Christi.
Incredibly, I haven't even covered the very first session fully - let alone all the other fantastic sessions that were offered. I know it's hard to believe but the two situations I related to you above all happened within the first hour or two of the very first day and it got better as the show went on.
What really needs to be brought out for your examination is the near unbelievable networking that happened with all the attendees. I picked up over four dozen business cards from people literally all over the world. I had coffee with Mark Wolf (Assistant General Manager and Chief Technology Officer for the City of Los Angeles) as well as lunch with people from the Philadelphia Project. After the sessions were over there were still networking receptions to attend.
Excellent speakers, solid information, intelligent people and good food, what's not to love? |
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