In an announcement that's sure to be please those in Ports, Transport & Logistics, 3PL verticals - the manufacturers in the wifi hardware industry are making it even easier to adopt the new Gigabit Wifi standard 802.11ac by dropping the prices of hardware to that of current existing 802.11n product.
If we use shipping container terminals an an example, in ports where there's an ever increasing demand for vehicle telemetry and real time information for fleet scheduling and management, the ability to have a broader band "backbone" to accomodate more mobile vehicles transmitting in near real time the on board vehicle telematics, to feed back into Terminal Operating Systems and other advanced scheduling applications is a real bonus.
In the past relying on narrowband networks with at best 9.6kbps for heavy data volume telematics was not ideal. It was solved somewhat by the adaptation of wifi 802.11 into outdoors environments, but 802.11 essentially was a consumer product taken to work outdoors in a rugged environment, later made better by specialised rugged devices specifically designed to cope in out doors industrial environments and things evolved and improved for the better from there.
A concern has always been that with too much additional telematics data also being sent on the outdoor wifi network in the container yard, that it would interfere with work instructions from the terminal operating system (TOS) to the container handling equipment jeopardising container movements.
There are still too many wasted and inefficiently planned moves in terminals and the simple adoption of fleet management systems (FMS) into container handling equipment (CHE) is a very viable solution to this problem, and it's becoming more and more cost effective to do as as the cost of the technology keeps decreasing.
A simple telematics "black-box" can be interfaced to the (newer) digital buses onboard on most modern CHE these days and then its a matter of sending back the telematics that's useful to you, or what you want to know, or KPI's you wish to track. You can collect a plethora of information much as fuel level, engine temperature, tyre pressure, speed and the enforcement of, hours in use, Oil temperature, oil level, battery voltage, etc.
With Gigabit wifi now coming on stream, this opens up huge potential for CHE telematics to be feeding back tons of information into job schedulers, Engineering programs to monitor vehicle performance and other programs that manage the efficient use of assets - this information is gold, as used and analysed correctly introduces improvements into your operation that goes straight to your bottom line - and you CEO is going to be smiling when they see the money saved.
If you're a larger operation and not using fleet management now - why not? It's becoming a no-brainer.
Revenue is leaking from your operation - and you might be very surprised just how much.......
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