Winning ways with Wap

A mobile Wap application and open source software is transforming the task of electricity meter reading and showing the efficiencies wireless can bring to companies with technicians working in the field.

West Auckland-based Electricity Management Services (EMS), has traded paperwork for wireless records updates as its technicians install and maintain thousands of electricity meters for clients such as Mercury Energy.

Using Siemens handsets, the technicians connect to a Wap portal, sending data about power usage as measured by the meter, the status of the job, and details of the work carried out, over Vodafone's GPRS network.

Wap (wireless application protocol) is a set of communication protocols that standardise the way mobile phones can be used for internet access.

"We've got a Wap server on the database in our office and the engineers enter the data directly into it using their phones. The phone becomes a hugely extended keyboard for entering info into the database," said the managing director of EMS, Craig Shepherd.

EMS originally developed its own system to manage electricity meter records with the back-end based on Microsoft's Access database, and a PC server.

Shepherd said that became untenable as the number of records grew. Theta Systems IBM Consultants Ker Win Ng and Deane Compton put together a system that uses IBM's DB2 Universal Database, running on Red Hat Linux.

While Microsoft Access was no longer used to run the main application, it was kept on as the front-end to the DB2 database, avoiding the need to retrain staff.

Shepherd says the Rapid Data application will pay for itself in five months, and that it has shaved some $12,000 off the annual communications bill, and $50,000 in staffing costs.

* Mobile application developers are invited to enter the Frontier transtasman competition being run by the Herald in conjunction with Ericsson. The competition seeks to find the best mobile applications from New Zealand and Australia. There are prizes for winners - and the chance to pitch applications to potential investors.

* Ericsson Frontier