Look Ma, no wires

THE mobile phone may have left behind its yuppie status and been taken up as a day to day tool by thousands of ordinary people…

THE mobile phone may have left behind its yuppie status and been taken up as a day to day tool by thousands of ordinary people, but most are used only for voice calls. Some pioneering companies, such as Dataport in Dublin, and some individuals, have connected computers to mobile phones for data communications but the older analogue Eircell system did not suit data particularly well.

The newer GSM mobile phone network is digital and since Eircell opened up the data channel on it last year there has been keen interest in putting it to use for wireless communications. A project at Cablelink in Dublin shows just how this might be used in future.

Cablelink has a number of people who work on the road calling on customers of its cable TV service. They traditionally worked with paper: a printed list of calls to make, printed customer records and then paper records of the work they had carried out and any payments they had received. It took up to a week for the Cablelink database to be updated with information collected this way.

The company has just completed a three month pilot project where most of the paper is replaced by a hand held Hewlett Packard 200LX computer and a Nokia mobile phone. Developed by Field Efficiency Systems (FES) of Limerick, the system allows the worker to record details of each job as soon as it is completed. After 10 jobs have been entered, or at a time interval set by Cablelink, the palmtop instructs the phone to dial and uploads the information at 9,600 bits per second. After being verified, the data is entered into the company's mainframe, within hours rather than days.

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FES designed the interface on the DOS compatible palmtop to suit mobile workers. The operating system is hidden from view and password protected. Typing is difficult on the tiny keyboard - so as many functions as possible are chosen from menus rather than typed. Some numbers which must be entered, like the customer account number, have internal checksums to ensure that a valid number has been entered.

At the head office end of the link a Windows based server answers the calls from the mobile units and collates the data for entry to the mainframe. FES says the typical call time to transfer 10 records is under one minute, so call charges are kept to a minimum.

In the future FES plans to include data calls to the mobile, so the worker's daily job list could be downloaded to the HP200 instead of being on paper. Mobile terminated" data calls like this are being tested by Eircell and should be made available for general use later this year. Also in the future is the short messaging service (SMS) which is part of the GSM specification. In Britain, where this is already available, it allows short messages (up to 160 characters) to be sent to and from mobile phones cheaply into: FES. tel 061-338118