Have you ever sat in a traffic jam and wondered what the wasted time was worth, especially if you added your time and that of the cars and drivers around you? With increasing road congestion it is a question that many service managers are starting to ask. They are even asking the same question in Brussels!

Through the complex web of MCUG activities, I’ve just come back from a workshop looking at ground penetrating radar, and how that might help make roadworks more efficient by finding out what was under the tarmac well before the diggers arrived to create mayhem. To answer the question posed above, we were given a figure that is apparently accepted by the worthies of Europe as a good estimate.

Money for Jam in the EU apparently sits at the princely annual sum of 80 billion euros! (Or to be precise 80 billion euros per year calculated over the original 15 European states at the year 2010). It’s both mind boggling, and also could be a handy bit of data to store away for the next pub trivia-quiz night. At a more serious level it suggests that, if you have more than a few staff out on the road, then it’s a distinct bite out of your profits or, at best, a challenge to your service response times.

Although the utilities and councils acknowledge the problem, and clearly believe that sometimes it’s not volume of traffic but road works that are the problem, even with smart radar technology they are not going to go away, and are set to get worse as traffic grows. Sat nav, and live data from the Highways Agency should help, provided your business is set up to use them effectively. The decision seems to be between reducing travel, putting in alternative tools, or suffering delays and wasted time. Although in many situations there is still no substitute for a visit to site, as a business here, we’ve invested in software to allow us to assist consultancy clients remotely.

I guess in a diverse business it only helps in about 10 to 20% of cases, but that’s still a useful saving in travel, and sometimes remote support tools can be used as a first line of diagnosis, and used immediately – giving the complainant a feeling that there is some first aid at hand. If we are to avoid too many losses in congestion the message is that we road users, and the utilities and councils all have to work smarter. It remains to be seen as to how effective the arrival of live congestion data from the Highway’s Agency really is, but if it ends up as a workable add-on to sat nav, which has had a remarkable rate of enthusiastic adoption, then there may be hope.

Holes in GPRS coverage have been aired here in this column before, whether coverage is really patchy, or whether it’s the new excuse for work-shy staff avoiding the next job remains to be seen. We’ve now completed the first phase of the MCUG sponsored development of our GPRS monitor, and through July we start testing in earnest.

If you are interested in this project, and the special interest group activity then please contact MCUG and let us know. One other alternative to holes in coverage is to use several networks. I have already written about the project that uses WiFi hotspots to help fill the coverage holes, however another idea is to use a foreign SIM card, and use a roaming licence. The costs used to be prohibitive, as the regulators seem to have left this as open house for everybody to overcharge and rip-off travelers.

A recent European community ruling has tightened up this loophole in what I believe was sloppy regulation, and now roving charges seem to be around 30p per minute, and data a bit less that £2 per megabyte. This is hardly cheap, but makes roving feasible for staff who have genuine coverage issues. Within MCUG we are hoping to have a closer look at this, and at the problems when your main business application is supported by multiple networks each with different IP addresses. I suspect that, like seamless roving on WiFi, the solution will be some careful and clever engineering in the communications server.

Security of mobile computers remains an issue. By security I mean in this context physical theft. Some users seem to be lucky, whereas others can lose maybe 5% or more of their mobile devices each year to felons with a penchant for items digital. There’s a fair number of remote management packages that will kill a stolen device if it ever attempts to connect to the network, and devices like RSA keys can help nail down security.

However, in reducing this risk I come back to some work I did a while ago, on the basis that much theft is opportunist, and that out-of-sight is out-of-harm. The mobile project here, which had a large number of nice toughened laptops, was a natural for a nice strong box to keep the computer in whilst in the van. Strong boxes originally offered were made of steel, usually with smart black epoxy paint.

These would easily defeat Mr Creep the crook unless he had an oxy-acetylene cutter handy! They seemed like the answer for the project until we spotted that the computer would use its radio (and in this case that was GPRS, GPS, WiFi and perhaps even bluetooth) when in the box. Radio signals are stopped by steel walls, and the computer would have had a very quiet time when in its little metallic nest. The answer, in the end, was the design of an alternative box made of car bumper grade ABS.

Although not quite the little Fort Knox steel box, tests showed that the ABS would put up quite a fight, and of course, all the wireless gizmo's stayed fully functional inside. I guess the point is that vehicle fitting takes quite a lot of thought, in yet it often gets put at the end of the project, and is done in a rush. With van fleets usually having a shorter life than mobile computers most mobile data systems go through at least one full re-fit, so the cost of the vehicle installation is often paid twice, so simple and flexible solutions make quite a difference to the benefits achieved.