November 1, 2008

Securing continuous mobile data connections

Angela Neville, JD

JEA’s road to communications success

JEA (formerly known as Jacksonville Electric Authority), one of the largest municipal utilities in the U.S., provides electricity, water, and sewer services to more than 750,000 accounts in northeast Florida. In the utility’s ongoing effort to improve customer service and reliability, IT staff at its plants focused recently on optimizing wireless communications for their mobile field personnel. The task is a complex one, because no single wireless communications network covers the entire 841 square miles of JEA’s service territory.

When problems such as hurricanes arise, JEA’s field workers are the utility’s first responders. They respond to power outages, fix meters, handle breaks in water and sewage mains, and turn service on and off. Even when it’s not hurricane season, these workers’ days are tightly scheduled. Communicating wirelessly makes sense for these field workers, but any wireless system has to meet JEA’s criteria:

• Ensure that mobile workers are getting up-to-the-minute information.

• Secure the workers’ communications.

• Allow workers to move from one network to another (from a wireless wide-area network to a hot spot, for example) without losing their connections.

• Field workers reported that they were losing valuable time with the wireless system whenever they were forced to switch to a new network. Each time a mobile technician’s wireless connection dropped, it was taking 20 to 30 minutes to log back into the system. In a fast-paced environment where minutes matter, this is an unacceptable loss of productivity, not to mention a source of irritation. The goal for JEA was keeping communications reliable even as its people moved from one network to another.

Kent Mathis, a registered professional engineer with the state of Florida who works in JEA’s New Technologies Department as a research project consultant, led the search for a solution. JEA had tried some IPSec and SSL VPN solutions, but their performance was not what the IT staff at JEA had hoped for, as these technologies were designed with wired, not wireless, connections in mind. A more specialized solution was needed, so Mathis developed a request for proposal to which five companies responded. During evaluation and testing, NetMotion Wireless was represented by USAT Corp., a partner specializing in mobility systems integration.

Mobility XE stood out from the competition on two important fronts:

• Integration. Mobility XE worked with all of the applications — both off-the-shelf and customized — to which JEA field workers need reliable and secure access: dispatch, customer relationship management tools, e-mail, geographic information systems, and electrical service delivery applications (for locating underground and electrical equipment), among others.

• Failover. During the NetMotion Wireless demonstration, Mobility XE was set up on a pair of servers in order to test its failover capabilities (the ability to switch over automatically to a standby server, system, or network upon the failure of the previously active server, system, or network). When one of the two servers went down due to hardware failure, the JEA evaluators didn’t even notice; it wasn’t until they examined the defective server that they realized a seamless server failover had occurred.

Ameren’s advances in wireless access

Ameren provides energy services to 2.4 million customers in Missouri and Illinois and natural gas to nearly one million customers. Recently, the utility began using Mobility XE software because its workers needed secure wireless access to customer and headquarters data when in the field on outage responses or service calls. Now when workers move in and out of wireless coverage areas, they no longer have to reconnect, or log back in to applications, or reenter lost data when connections are lost.

Cory pointed out the key benefits of the software for Ameren:

• Improvement in productivity and the utility’s return on investment.

• Seamless transitions between wireless and wired networks without user intervention.

• Automatic selection of the fastest available wireless network.

• The power to provide IT administrators with a systemwide view of device activity, application use, and device connections across all networks.

• Data compression and link optimizations to improve application performance and reduce network consumption over bandwidth-constrained networks.

• The ability for IT administrators to manage network access, quarantine lost or stolen devices, prioritize or block applications, automatically distribute anti-virus/OS patch updates to remote devices, and additional applications.

Equipped with reliable wireless resources, Ameren field workers can more effectively respond to emergencies, expedite service, respond to inquiries, and process work orders.

—By Angela Neville, JD