I watched a recent video posted to a news network which showed a policeman in the USA discussing with the householder why the parents needed to persuade their daughter to remove inflammatory social media posts. Whilst the content was fascinating from a news perspective, more interesting, (to me anyway), was the fact that the video feed was shot from the in-vehicle CCTV, parked several metres away, but the audio was from the policeman’s vest microphone. The audio was clear, crisp and captured clearly the conversation from all parties gathered near the front door. Of course wearable technology is not new, police in the UK have been wearing bodycams and have carried PMR radio handsets for some time. What is exciting, and what the potential for the new Emergency Services Network, (ESN) is the ability to aggregate a whole host of mobile technologies together to orchestrate with intelligence the data streams into a single, resilient, coordinated system. Using cellular LTE networks with greater bandwidths and combining both PMR and LTE seamlessly together, as well as integrating Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and RFID peripherals, allows for better functionality and scope of operation in a field environment.
There are many manufacturers of single solution systems, for the mobile market; from driver behaviour to temperature monitoring and CCTV. All come with their bespoke connectivity system, usually over cellular and into a cloud platform with APIs to take data feeds into a customer’s own control system. All those little islands of data streaming, never integrating with the other isolated data flows and ignorant of the small threads of information that is required, a case of sending everything over LTE rather than sending what is needed. The result is that these systems running costs are enormous. A fleet of vehicles with two or three monitoring systems might carry five or six SIM cards with the potential coverage costs on the Mobile Network Operators, (MNO) contracts. So whilst the potential for ESN and the aggregation of systems is there, its cost viability rests on the ability to limit the data transmitted to the essential information needed.
Enter Simoco’s Velocity EC-800 series of intelligent communication hub devices. System agnostic, Velocity provides aggregation of data streams via a variety of data inputs; RS232, GPIO, GPS, CANBus, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, and uses Node-RED logic. The device provides the edge intelligence to send the right information across LTE, Wi-Fi or PMR networks, reducing transmission cost and aggregating mobile systems into an intelligent focused hub. If you want mobile transmission speed with intelligent data direction then contact Simoco Wireless Solutions to discuss your mission critical requirements.
