The City of St. John’s, North America’s oldest city, is undergoing a wireless and mobility makeover. The City will equip over 100 civic workers with handheld devices to gain real-time, remote access to the Citizen Service and other mission-critical applications. Other components of the City of St. John’s wireless strategy include:
- Automatic Vehicle Locators (AVL) – 80 snow plows are being equipped with hybrid modems with GPS sensors, which can be geographically mapped throughout St. John’s.
- Public access website - Citizens will be able to log onto a website to determine exact location of plows and other service equipment. Mobile workers using handheld computers, can view a service request and go directly to the area requiring service.
- Wireless access to email - for City workers using Compaq iPAQs
- Building and Safety Inspection - Consilient’s WRAP technology is being used to extend the in-house program that building and safety inspectors use wirelessly to ruggedized handheld units.
- Asphalt Temperature Sensors - Sensors are being embedded in the asphalt of city streets, which are hooked into a weather forecasting system. The sensors emit a signal when the temperature begins to drop, indicating a need for road salting.
EVER America’s Citizen Service provides intergovernmental collaboration for disaster management and recovery for natural or manmade disasters such as Homeland Security.
ViewSonic’s $299 X-scale Pocket PC with a $50 Wi-Fi card might save $300-$400 annually over cellular fees. Now multiply by a dozen or more different service industries and thousands of clients in the metro area.
RoamAD’s technology goes way beyond hotspots . The company has already turned the central business district of Auckland, New Zealand, an area of three square kilometers, into one giant hotspot. You can surf the internet or even make and receive phone calls via the network’s VoIP capabilities, bypassing the local wired loop. Pocket Presence runs Voice-over-IP on Wi-Fi handheld devices, while Vocera’s clip-on device has a press to talk (and dial) button and Nexian provides mobile videoconferencing on a handheld.
The value proposition of a public/private Wi-Fi network seems inevitable.
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