Continue from Part 2.

Group systems manager David Lloyd said the system produced near perfect accuracy and slashed operator working times. ?It is amazingly accurate,? he says. ?It takes 15 to 20 minutes to train operators in the system and it is then 99.9% accurate. In any stock control system, the keyword is accuracy. The only way this can fail is if the operator puts in the wrong information, but even then everything is recorded so there is an audit trail.

Building on WiFi is Wimax, or IEEE 802.16. At the early stages of adoption, it offers the potential to replace copper in the last mile and to support up to 75Mbit/s over tens of miles. In a few cases, entire cities have achieved WiMax coverage.

Another new kid on the wireless block is Zigbee. Based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, access to the specifications is controlled by the Zigbee Alliance. The key benefits are cheapness, simplicity and long battery life when compared with similar personal area network technologies, such as Bluetooth. Transmission range is up to 75m, bandwidth is up to 250kbit/s and nodes can be arranged in star, peer to peer or mesh topologies. The ability for Zigbee units to form mesh networks is seen as a key advantage, because that configuration can reroute should one node go down.

Expectations for Zigbee are high. Market research company Harbor Research says that, by 2008, there will 100million wireless sensors in use, up from about 200,000 today. The worldwide market for wireless sensor networks, it says, will grow from $100m in 2005 to more than $1billion by 2009.

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Cable is on the retreat. In almost every data application, one form of wireless networking or another is supplanting copper and fibre, whether in the last few metres with personal area networks or in the ?last mile? with WiMax.

The key technology areas ? mobile phone networks, wireless LAN and short range, low bandwidth methods of transmission such as Zigbee ? are becoming pervasive. So, what levels of adoption are they achieving and what are their chief uses in industry?

Mobile ?phone based remote monitoring and control benefits from wide areas of coverage and bandwidth ranging from a few kbit/s on GSM networks to a few Mbit/s with 3G. In many applications, sheer bandwidth is not necessary and effective monitoring and control networks have been built which capitalize on mobile networks? ability to cover wide areas of the countryside.

British Waterways, for example, has used Vodafone?s GPRS network to monitor flow rates, pumps and water levels on 2000 miles of rivers and canals. There previously staff had to manually check often remote locations, data is now polled in seconds using sensors connected to modems which transmit to the organization?s SCADA centres where key details are shown on a geographical information system.

Elsewhere, industrial and medical gases supplier Cryoservice has connected 30 of its delivery and engineering staff to back end applications using O2?s GPRS network and XDA II PDAs supplied by Handheld PCs. This allows real time tracking of deliveries and work assignments, proof of delivery and stock control via flyingSpark field services software which is also linked to satnav on the PDA.

Neil Grimshaw, CryoService?s financial controller, says: ?By automating many of the tasks the engineers previously had to do manually, such as time sheet recording and reporting back to head office, the solution has created a 20% to 30% time saving.?

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