3G Wireless Means Speed-And Savings
Information moves faster, but better yet, it's cheaper.
John Bendel
Technology Editor
Third-generation - or 3G wireless - is on the scene in virtually all major U.S. markets, and it's spreading to smaller metro areas and along major interstates.
3G is a general term. Wireless service providers call individual technologies by names that vary from company to company - UMTS, HSDPA and EV-DO for starters. More about that later,
All 3G offerings differ from earlier networks in one important way - especially for fleet operators.
Joel Beal, director of marketing and customer relations for Tripmaster, put it succinctly:
"3G means information moves faster - which isn't as big a deal as the (service providers) would have you think. But it's much cheaper, and that is a big deal. Cheap is good," he said.
REAL-TIME INVENTORY
There's a lot of trucking data 3G can move.
Tripmaster supplies onboard computers and fleet management systems primarily to private fleets, which can generate plenty of information.
"A food delivery fleet will average about 12 stops a day. A food services fleet will average about 100 to 150 cases per stop. These cases may or may not be all the same. They may or may not be priced differently," Beal explained. "With our typical customer there's so much data being created and the trucks are usually back in a day or two. There was no way in a cost scenario they could justify moving that information wirelessly in real time. What they generally did was move a little sliver of information real-time. Where's the truck? Where's the last place he was? They would leave the rest for batch download when the truck returns."
LTL fleets, particularly local pickup & delivery runs, also generate lots of data. Increasingly, RFID tags will identify freight - initially at the pallet level, but eventually at the unit level - at least where high value goods are concerned. 3G will be able to move that information in real time at an affordable cost.
"Now we've got the economic model that makes sense," Beal said.
"Real time simply means that when a delivery is made, inventory at the consignee is adjusted. You know the stuff got there. Inventory at the shipper is adjusted. It left the warehouse and went in the truck. Now it's gone from the truck and is in the customer's hands.
"If there's any discrepancy on the delivery - damage, shortage, spoilage, whatever - that can be noted and the invoice adjusted right there. And for some customers it speeds up the payables cycle by almost a full day, which is a pretty big deal," Beal said.
IN-CAB OFFICE
3G may speed technology adoption by fleets that are reluctant to go entirely paperless.
"Some of our customers tell us their customers are a little resistant to the idea of a paperless truck cab. A lot of end users do care. That affects us. It affects our sales of paperless cab systems. It affects everybody.
"Real, honest-to-goodness 3G will get the price point down to where imaging, printing and stuff like that is economically feasible. It would allow you to transmit high quality fax images, things of that nature," Beal explained.
Tom McLeod is president of Tom McLeod Software, a supplier of enterprise software for truck fleets. His customers are largely, but not exclusively, commercial truckload carriers.
"We've got a customer right now who would like to fax to and from the truck. They would like to fax the overweight permits to the truck and they would like to be able to scan documents - scan the proof of delivery - in the truck and transmit back," McLeod said.
"My initial comment was, well, what about the truckstop scanning solutions for receiving your weight permits and that kind of thing. They said, you know, from a safety standpoint, we've looked at it. We have more accidents where the truck was trying to find the truckstop or had to get turned around to get back to the truckstop."
McLeod said this fleet is convinced it would be more economical to have scanning capability in the cab.
However, few printers and even fewer scanners are built for the rugged cab environment. As 3G is adopted and demand grows, that market will develop.
"We already have printers available today. We've had those for a number of years. They're not widely used, but there are carriers who use printers. We actually buy those from the leading manufacturers. We test it, make sure it works to meet our customers needs," said Norm Ellis, vice president and general manager of transportation & logistics wireless business solutions for Qualcomm.
"You get back to the issue of how you actually capture the image, whether you do it with a camera or you do it with an imaging device in the cab of the truck. Putting those rending issues aside, the network with 3G will certainly be in a much better position to do it economically."
Since 2000 Qualcomm has marketed a mobile communications and fleet management system called OmniEXPRESS, which is similar in most respects to Qualcomm's flagship OmniTRACS satellite product that largely serves the truckload market. OmniEXPRESS is aimed at LTL and private fleets with local and regional operations and uses the Sprint digital wireless network.
"Our plans are to move that product over to the 3G network in early '05 and take advantage of those higher bandwidth rates for our customers," Ellis said.
SAFETY AND DRIVER SERVICES
Brian McLaughlin, marketing vice president for PeopleNet Communications, said his company took the 3G issue to its advisory council, made up of 20 or so fleet customers.
"Among the biggest things our advisory council ranked, that we will be delivering, is accident reconstruction. It is a very high priority for us," McLaughlin said, adding PeopleNet will be rolling out an accident reconstruction module in this quarter. It will be available for existing 2G equipment, but also for PeopleNet's new 3G onboard computer called, aptly enough, the G3.
"The incident can be triggered by one of several factors. It can be the driver hitting a button; it could be sudden deceleration or sudden acceleration that is based on a configurable threshold. We're going to capture (data) second-by-second, prior to the event and also after the event and show a graphical representation of key variables, such as speed, direction, location, clutch, idle, RPMs, brake application and a number of others," McLaughlin explained.
"It's a snapshot encapsulated in a large packet of data that's passed down as these events are triggered. With a 3G high bandwidth, it's not difficult to add to that a video component. Here's all the data from the engine, now let's take a video recording of that accident. You could actually see what happened.
"The video component is in the near future. An event occurs, video captures that snapshot. There are three things you can do. You can send it back urgently or we can store it, batch it up and send it at the end of the day or we can store it and overwrite it. But we can send it back so you'll have it if you need it," he said.
McLaughlin said the accident module is already working in a beta test fleet that uses it to capture even minor damage to a truck.
"If you ding the side of a trailer, the driver is prompted to indicate this so they have a record of what happened," He said.
According to McLaughlin, the test fleet stores accident module data onboard and downloads it on return to base. But 3G wireless will make it feasible to transmit the data in real time.
PeopleNet's customers include a number of commercial truckload carriers. The No. 1 issue for those fleets, he said, is attracting and retaining drivers. 3G can be both a driver retention and a training tool.
"You begin to offer things like the in-cab office, you give them things like Internet access and also the ability to view movies and training and make it much more of a roaming home and a roaming office."
3G COVERAGE AND WHO PROVIDES IT
3G coverage is mostly in major population areas, at least for now.
"Some truckload carriers will use it, but we're going to have to be operating in good density for coverage purposes," said Qualcomm's Norm Ellis. "If they're going coast to coast, I question how terrestrial will work for them. If they're running between Boston and Miami, it'll work great because on I-95, you're probably never out of coverage."
Fleet operators interested in 3G applications will probably buy their 3G service through a vendor like Qualcomm, PeopleNet or Tripmaster, among many others. That's because 3G by itself doesn't provide trucking functionality; that takes trucking-specific hardware and software systems.
However, basic 3G services such as voice phone, Internet access and messaging, are available to subscribers with nothing more than a 3G digital handset and a 3G provider.
There are many wireless service providers, but soon there will be only four offering service on a national scale.
T-Mobile and Cingular - which is absorbing the AT&T Wireless network - offer service based on GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) technology, a standard in Europe and the most widely deployed wireless technology in the world. Verizon and Sprint meanwhile use CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) technology licensed from Qualcomm. Nextel, which currently uses Motorola's iDen network, will merge with Sprint and eventually move to a new generation of CDMA.
GSM providers T-Mobile and Cingular offer - or will soon offer - 2.5G and 3G services with names like GPRS (General Packet Radio System), EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution) and UMTS (Universal Mobile Tele-communications System) and HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access). Some GSM 3G service is called 3GSM, which uses a transmission technology called W-CDMA, for Wideband-CDMA. W-CDMA works on top of the networks' basic GSM structure and is distinct from basic CDMA offered by Verizon and Sprint.
Those two companies refer to their high-capacity offerings as EV-DO, which stands for either Evolution Data Optimized or Evolution Data-Only, depending on who's talking. Verizon calls their EV-DO product Broad-bandAccess, and it's currently available in at least 30 metropolitan areas.
A variety of 3G products from all providers will become available in many markets this year.
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