Adopt a Technophobe - It Will Help Them and Make You Feel Good
Mon, 12/12/2005 - 18:51
Communications
The secret to interoperability for networked applications is a layered network. Is this a surprise to anyone? If it is, then you are probably a wireless communications engineer from the ‘old school’.
This is one of those truths that seems so simple and straightforward that it is surprising to find a practicing engineer that doesn’t understand it – but they do exist. There has been a lot of press over the last year or so about emergency services radios that don’t talk to each other, which means that police can’t talk to firemen and neither can call directly for ambulances. This is particularly true when large forces are imported to deal with disasters like fires or tornados, as has been painfully evident time after time this year.
An article in EE Times today talked about a company that actually did something about it. These guys put a network layer on top of some radio communications protocols – a trick that is hardly all that difficult – and used it to tie together emergency services personnel. They are in the process of productizing it, which should make it more palatable to technology-challenged managers of those systems.
I have run into this before. I consulted to a major power company and advised them to replace their proprietary network with a standardized one built on standard components that routed between WAN networks and local Wifi or Bluetooth links. The IT manager flatly declared that such a product as this router did not exist. I offered to make him one out of any laptop in the room and a couple of PCMCIA cards, but he suddenly had to leave for another meeting.
We in the high-tech field sometimes forget that there is a real world out there that really doesn’t understand what is possible. We can sit back and chuckle over their naiveté or we can go out there and productize it so that they see what is possible. The former can be a lot of fun, but the latter is the way to make money.
Larry Mittag
This is one of those truths that seems so simple and straightforward that it is surprising to find a practicing engineer that doesn’t understand it – but they do exist. There has been a lot of press over the last year or so about emergency services radios that don’t talk to each other, which means that police can’t talk to firemen and neither can call directly for ambulances. This is particularly true when large forces are imported to deal with disasters like fires or tornados, as has been painfully evident time after time this year.
An article in EE Times today talked about a company that actually did something about it. These guys put a network layer on top of some radio communications protocols – a trick that is hardly all that difficult – and used it to tie together emergency services personnel. They are in the process of productizing it, which should make it more palatable to technology-challenged managers of those systems.
I have run into this before. I consulted to a major power company and advised them to replace their proprietary network with a standardized one built on standard components that routed between WAN networks and local Wifi or Bluetooth links. The IT manager flatly declared that such a product as this router did not exist. I offered to make him one out of any laptop in the room and a couple of PCMCIA cards, but he suddenly had to leave for another meeting.
We in the high-tech field sometimes forget that there is a real world out there that really doesn’t understand what is possible. We can sit back and chuckle over their naiveté or we can go out there and productize it so that they see what is possible. The former can be a lot of fun, but the latter is the way to make money.
Larry Mittag
