Wireless Wins

For example, the Beach Bus route in the resort town of Rehoboth Beach, Del., scored a record 13.5 percent ridership increase during the summer of 2001, thanks to a wireless arrival time estimation service by NextBus Information Systems, Emeryville, Calif., that makes taking mass transit a much more reliable recourse. Between Memorial Day and Labor Day, 17 buses handled 235,000 riders, up from 206,700 the previous year. The biggest prior annual increase was just 3 percent.

"We have seen a tremendous growth in [the number of passengers since we put this system in [during 2000," says Raymond Miller, executive director for Delaware Transit.

NextBus equips buses with global positioning system transceivers, cellular digital packet data modems and antennas, which transmit their real-time locations to NextBus servers. Using the buses' actual positions, scheduled stops and historical traffic patterns, NextBus can estimate their arrival times with great accuracy. Continually updated arrival estimates are beamed to wireless LED signs at bus stops and businesses, Internet-enabled cell phones, Pilots and other PDAs.

It costs some $7,000 to equip a bus, and $4,000 per sign, but the expense is justified by higher utilization rates. The Beach Bus fleet actually logged fewer service hours in 2001 while setting a stunning new ridership record. NextBus recently landed a $9.6 million contract to outfit buses in San Francisco, one of the company's 20 municipal customers.

Benefits of Wireless Networks

Many state and local agencies are linking legacy mainframe systems to their wireless digital counterparts. "We've seen 40 percent growth in [government wireless applications this past year," says Hugh Raiford, vice president of marketing at ClientSoft, which has expertise in IBM AS/400 and S/390 middleware.

The Miami-based company recently developed a wireless field-reporting network for the police department of Kingman, Ariz. In addition, more than 1,000 building inspectors in Florida's Miami-Dade County rely on ClientSoft's in.Touch middleware to deliver inspection reports to contractors in 10 minutes, instead of the previous two days.

"Mobile applications improve customer service, reduce errors, save truck rolls and improve [workflow," Raiford says. It's often easier to sell the ROI of wireless to governments than to businesses, he adds, because governments have the budgets and methods to thoroughly document the costs of processes that would benefit from wireless networks.

Much of ClientSoft's business has come from partnerships with IBM Global Services and AT&T Wireless, he adds. Partnering with large prime contractors reduces a reseller's time-to-revenue. "Once the devices to be used are identified and network services are provided, implementing a system takes about 30 to 45 days," Raiford says.

Mike Mancuso, group president of mobile government solutions for Aether Systems, Owings Mills, Md., also advises small to midsize resellers to partner with "large primes" for state and federal government business. "The selling process is long and complicated, and the administrative burdens are significant."

Police at Boston's Logan International Airport are using Aether's PocketBlue handheld software and BlackBerry wireless handhelds from Research In Motion, Waterloo, Ontario, to check passengers for outstanding warrants, felonies and other red flags through the National Crime Information Center. Sea-Tac Airport in Seattle began testing PocketBlue in March, Baltimore's BWI Airport is next and other airports are knocking at Aether's door.

BlackBerry's messaging service is also helping Kentucky state government executives stay on top of their schedules and e-mail. The Governor's Office for Technology, which handles 30,000 e-mail accounts for 35 agencies, selected BlackBerry for its real-time e-mail and calendar-update capabilities. Users don't have to dial in to retrieve messages; the BlackBerry network pushes information to the handhelds as soon as it's available.

Even the Texas State Board of Barber Examiners has gone wireless, with a system designed by River Run Software Group.Barber inspectors are armed with HP Jornada 690 PDAs with Sierra Wireless AirCards and HP battery-powered ink-jet printers linked to the PDAs via infrared ports, allowing inspectors to print reports and fines on the spot.

Off-the-shelf hardware suits most wireless government projects, with the exception of harsh environments like military or fire-inspection applications. VARs can add value by developing software systems that port familiar paper- or desktop-PC-based business processes to the wireless environment. Local and state agencies are keenly aware of the benefits of mobility. To find mobile opportunities in the government sector, a VAR need only look in the U.S. Blue Pages of the local phone book.

Marching To the Wireless Beat

Even the U.S. Army is getting on board, saying it plans to deploy 11,000 802.11b wireless LAN gateways this spring. Based on Cisco's access points and workgroup bridges, the Combat Service Support Automated Information System Interface (CAISI) will link 85,000 troops to supply, maintenance and logistics systems on the Defense Department's wired networks.

CAISI was briefly delayed following last year's Sept. 11 attacks, when the Department of Defense imposed a moratorium on use of wireless networks that did not meet the Federal Information Processing Security (FIPS) standard. Fortunately for CAISI, systems integrator Superlative Technologies (SuprTek) had been pitching the AirFortress wireless security system to the DoD since June 2001.

SuprTek, based in McLean, Va., provided engineering support and certification assistance for the AirFortress technology, integrated the AirFortress server and Cisco access point in a ruggedized, portable system, and will perform the deployment and training phase of the CAISI project.

"We have been preaching security for wireless networks for three years now," says Greg Walker, executive vice president for SuprTek. "Now everyone is listening."

The company is fielding an increasing number of inquiries about AirFortress from military, intelligence and other federal agencies.

The AirFortress system consists of a software client, a security gateway and an access-control device. The gateway sits between the access points and the wired LAN, handling client authentication, encryption and access-rights management. The access controller is used to define user-access rights enforced by the gateways.

Unlike a VPN, the AirFortress system does not exact a 20 to 30 percent throughput penalty, and does not require users to reconnect when they roam from one wireless subnet to another. AirFortress encrypts data at IP Layer 2 instead of

the less-secure Level 3 encryption used by most competing products, and uses data compression to boost throughput up to 100 percent.