UPDATED: There’s a new wireless local area network (WLAN)
of Seattle and Orlando. Other municipalities may well be watching to see how
it does sniffing out any and all bandwidth hogs whose recreational surfing
activities in municipal wireless networks could impair public safety
communications needs.
That sheriff is NetMotion Wireless’s Mobility Policy Management system,
which helps administrators configure and provision who gets to use how much
of a WLAN.
The Seattle-based NetMotion Wireless, which now counts about 275
municipalities as customers out of its base of over 400, is now supplying
Policy Management Control tools to the public safety departments of Aurora, the Port of Seattle and Orlando.
The software runs as an add-on module for its flagship
NetMotion Mobility XE product, which lets companies control wireless data
usage and manage specific workgroups, users and devices.
Like other Policy Management users, explained Aaron Burnett, senior
director of marketing for NetMotion Wireless, each new customer relies on
wide-area wireless data services from cellular carriers, such as AT&T
Wireless, T-Mobile, Sprint and Verizon Wireless. That’s in combination with
their Wi-Fi (802.11) access networks.
The idea with the policy management module is to provide application-level
policy capabilities necessary for IT managers to centrally control
application traffic by wireless network type, network speed, employee
profile or device, he said.
“We’re also assuring that mission-critical applications have security,”
given that these wireless networks really provide life-saving information
for officers in the field, he added.
But the tool also helps keep employees from sucking up the bandwidth for
playful uses. A recent IDC report said more than half of the $26.6 million that
the typical large U.S. enterprise pays each year for network services is
spent on recreational data traffic.
In some customer cases, the needs are as basic as ensuring their data
network resources are available at critical times, Burnett added. For
others, the Policy Management module choice was all about cost savings,
especially for IT managers who have to make field calls themselves to fix
laptops riddled with malicious code from “recreational” surfing sessions.
Michael Bedwell, public safety systems manager with Aurora, said before
the jurisdiction deployed the Policy Management system, technicians were spending at least
three hours, multiple times per week, repairing individual systems due to
malicious data downloaded from the Internet.
Bedwell said before Aurora’s deployment of the Mobility Policy Management
module, indiscriminate use of the Internet by mobile police and fire
personnel had caused a 100-fold increase in wireless network traffic. Policy Management
reversed that increase about 99 percent.
Beyond the unproductive nature of recreational surfing, in a wireless
setting such traffic can quickly usurp available bandwidth, undermine
interactive applications and often incapacitate a network, NetMotion
officials said.
With this module, the policies are enforced on the client side, which
means that bandwidth patrol goes everywhere the workers do — and in some
cases, even helps police the fire and police.
Updates prior version to correct spelling of Aaron Burnett
