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Intelligent Mobile Office

Plan

“Traditionally we have had big problems in providing data site connectivity to projects in time for the start of the contract.”
Neill Pawsey, IT Manager, Jackson Civil Engineering

“With the arrival of higher speed mobile data networks using technologies like 3G and Edge, innovative mobile applications and services can now be developed. i-MO was conceived as a practical solution to the clear requirement for instant data connectivity at remote or short term construction sites.”
Andrew Lambert, Managing Director, EMS

Background

Jackson Civil Engineering is a national contractor with a turnover of approximately £110M. Their clients are typically within the public sector (Environment Agency, Highways Agency, Network Rail) in sectors including maintenance, structures, costal and small highways schemes. The company works from a series regional offices primarily in the south of England. A large part of their work is conducted as small to medium-sized projects with relatively short durations. Jackson Civil Engineering use email, intranet and other systems to manage the day-to-day operations on their sites. To enable this, a reliable internet connection is required from the first days on site.

Problem

Whilst large sites and regional offices are linked sufficiently via ADSL, site staff are often provided with 56kbps ‘dial-up’ internet connections. These use standard telephone lines to enable data communications with a remote access server at Jackson’s Ipswich head office. This is slow and limited by the number of modem ports available. Additionally, security is compromised by the connection bypassing system firewalls and British Telecom currently take 3-4 weeks to install a line and costs range unpredictably. Additional problems include a minimum six month contract for a faster ADSL connection and extra delay for its installation. Communications are severely hampered prior to the upgrading of the internet connection which means Jackson’s incur large courier costs for sending paper documents. A quarter of projects can be started and completed before fixed data communications are installed.

Proposed solution

The proposed solution is an ‘all-in-one’ mobile office that connects to the internet via a variety of modes. Initially this will be by means of the cellular telephone network, theoretically enabling access from a significant proportion of the country. The solution must provide the following qualities:

Quick installation and site setup;
High speed access to corporate LAN;
Resilient connectivity;
Simple to use and configure; and,
Low cost.

Jackson’s have taken a pair of SCC Intelligent Office units on trial. These are capable of taking multiple bearers (e.g. 3G, ADSL, WiFi) and provide instant connectivity for site staff. The units are being used with a 3G service from Orange, but the ability to engage multiple bearers allows the fixed line connection to be used when ADSL is installed. The solution also provides site office computing needs such as wireless and fixed local area networks, and, file and print servers. The package is a managed service; reducing the requirement for remote site support to be provided by Jackson’s IT department.

Pilot

“Access to information and emails as soon as you are on site; the rest of the world expects you to be able to pick up emails so you tend to struggle and look inept if you can't.”
Teresa Jeffcoat, Site Engineer, Jackson Civil Engineering

“I was one of the first guys to get one of the i-Mo boxes. A lot of reliability problems and poor speed in the early days but when it works well its brilliant.”
Jerry Simpson, Senior Engineer, Jackson Civil Engineering

Pilot information

The development process was quite long; Jackson Civil Engineering (JCE) started looking at solutions in 2004 and didn’t receive a trial unit until September 2005. This was delivered to its first site in November 2005. Site trials continued through the winter and the free trial period extended to allow further development of the system.

Development

Neill Pawsey, a Civil Engineer turned IT professional, is the IT Manager for JCE. He was keen to make the management of remote IT systems more efficient; reducing the time his small IT department spent solving connection issues and providing a more reliable service to the project management staff of JCE’s smaller sites. Neill became the champion for the introduction of i-MO and took an active role in its development.

Requirements

The brief was to develop a solution to get sites up and running very quickly with the potential to manage the system remotely. From the brief it was deemed that there were three key issues to overcome in the solution’s design:

Bandwidth: although the connection rate should be 512kbps, the minimum for management purposes is 100kbps. 3G data services - the obvious choice ’ are insufficient due to the variance in service level around the average of about 256kbps in a good coverage area.
IP (Network) Roaming: the solution requires a single private network address regardless of the service provider or network it is running on. This is essential to enable the location and management of appliances.
Aggregation: there are products in the market for the bonding of data bearers although these are limited to bearers of the same type or from the same service provider. In both cases they require specialised equipment in the service provider’s network. Thus, the solution had to bond these provisions together itself.

Deployment

“The trials with JCE have proved that i?MO is simple to install and meets the requirements for instant data connectivity to remote sites. The latency of the system is low enough for interactive applications to be deployed to remote users over Citrix and Terminal Services.”
Andrew Lambert, Managing Director, EMS

“We have used i-Mo on a number of smaller site on our Cambridgeshire County Council Framework contract. Although signal reception and performance can be varaible, it is easy to set up and it has given us the benefit of connectivity where previously we would have had none.”
Jamie Boast, Site Agent, Jackson Civil Engineering

Implementation

The prototype solution has two 3G cards, one GPRS card, one Wi-Fi card and an ADSL modem. The need to ’own’ the termination points on both ends of the network required the creation of a concentrator, referred to as the i-MO Manager. To ensure that users do not have direct visibility of the networks and to serve against network borne abuse the individual tunnels provided by each of these services are amalgamated into a single persistent virtual private network tunnel.

Initial trials showed that the 3G protocol is more asymmetric than ISDN; download speeds are faster than upload, ideal for applications such as the World Wide Web where most data is pulled to the user but less useful for two-way exchanges. Whilst this will not cause excessive problems for JCE, it is worth bearing in mind for future development of applications.

Site issues

Once connected, the users suggested that connection speeds were poor compared to the fixed line systems that they are used to. This is supported by trials conducted by JCE, which shows that the average effective bandwidth utilization is well below the speeds previously published. In the Bar Hill site case, the average barely improved on dial-up modem speeds causing great problems to staff who often receive emails that are too large to realistically download over such a connection.

Part of the problem lies with the available signal strength, and whether this is GPRS or the faster 3G protocol. This is evident in the data: in the case of Bar Hill where GPRS coverage was only good the average bandwidth dropped to 60kbps.

Typically site offices use secure steel container units which are delivered to site for the duration of the project. Site use of the i-MO units noted that these steel units were restricting the passage of signal to the i-MO with an associated loss of performance of the system. To remedy this, external directional antennae need to be used to improve the quality of the signal strength. This had the benefit of increasing, again at Bar Hill, the ’up-time’ of the unit.

Solution

The i-MO solution features:

’Power on’ simplicity to enable limited user technical knowledge;
A resilient VPN wireless connection to fixed corporate networks via the Internet;
IP compression for maximum bandwidth and therefore greater transmission speeds;
Automatic network roaming to ensure maximum bandwidth and minimum cost at all times; and,
Secure Wi-Fi or Ethernet access for users, servers and printers.

Evaluation

“i-MO is the first solution we have seen that appears to address all our requirements in terms of speed, reliability and cost.”
Neill Pawsey, IT Manager, Jackson Civil Engineering

“The Worst thing with the system was Reliability- it has a tendency to recognise when you most need to send an email and stop just as you press send.”
Teresa Jeffcoat, Site Engineer, Jackson Civil Engineering

“We are grateful for the tremendous support we have had from Orange and the team at JCE while we have developed the solution from a prototype into a commercial product.”
Andrew Lambert, Managing Director, EMS

Evaluation ROI

The i-MO unit JCE have trialled will be a valuable tool; it provides an Internet connection for site staff at a very early stage in the project. Other, generally fixed-line connections, are not possible at this time due to the long period of time required it takes for providers to install these facilities. For projects with duration of less than approximately four months there should be no need for fixed lines to be installed at all. Mobile telephones, carried by virtually all management staff, and i-MO units will provide all of the communication requirements a site requires.

However, this reality has yet to be reached ’ the i-MO units do not yet provide the functionality required to fill the void left between a contractor’s requirement for Internet connectivity and the performance offered by GPRS and 3G cellular networks. This is a problem EMS and JCE are still trying to resolve since EMS have conducted their own tests that show average speeds of 600kbps are obtainable. Its ability to share this connection amongst local computers by means of a local area network (wired or wireless) has some benefits, especially for sites where more than two or three people need to connect their computers.

Lessons

Important lessons were learnt from the project, including:

DO NOT assume that the most complicated solution will provide the best solution ’ keep it simple.
DO consider other industries that may experience the same requirements and investigate their solutions.
DO NOT assume that you will need a unique and custom-built solution; look at other industries and solutions provided by a range of supplies.
DO fully consider the requirements of the solution and any ’nice to have’ features. Ensure that these ’nice to haves’ do not impact on the performance of the core mechanism.
DO consider how the user will feel with the solution and concentrate on ensuring that they are happy with it. For example, the speed of an Internet connection is the main indicator for the i?MO users; make sure that it is satisfactory or comparable.
DO make it clear that users are undertaking a prototype test and that they may experience some teething problems.

Costs

The establishment of i-MO units on JCE sites will remove the requirement for installing BT telephone lines and subsequent upgrade to ADSL for small projects. A saving of £600 is expected over a four month scheme. This does not include for the upgrade of the communications to ADSL which will incur further cost should increased performance in terms of speed of transfer (bandwidth) be required.

Other cost savings may be obtained from a reduced requirement for transmitting plans by courier and reduced number of calls to JCE’s IT support desk.

What next?

Since many of the problems associated with i-MO revolve around it failing to meet the prescribed bandwidth targets trials are taking place to introduce Riverbed compression technology. This is being conducted in conjunction with Shepherd Construction, another company trialling the i-MO unit.