UNWIRED PARCEL SERVICE: WIRELESS DATA DELIVERS AT UPS

As wireless service providers and mobile technology vendors search for the best ways to break into the coveted corporate enterprise market, they should be looking to global shipping giant United Parcel Service for clues. Not only has the company been using specialized wireless devices and data services for 10 years, the Atlanta-based firm also has made some big decisions recently about how it plans to employ wireless in the future.

Those plans cover both the obvious mobility needs of UPS delivery drivers, as well as less obvious in-building wireless enhancements that could improve efficiency at UPS's distribution hubs and other offices.

UPS is gradually introducing grounding-breaking, multi-protocol data devices for its drivers. With these devices in hand, the drivers will scarcely be left without network connectivity, no matter what network environment or conditions exist. Meanwhile, with the help of long-time vendor Symbol Technologies, UPS has launched its own customized network and devices for in-building usage.

Up to this point, UPS has not sought much help from mobile carriers in drawing up its local area and wide area network blueprint for the future, which will come as disappointment to wireless service providers that think they make the best possible mobility partners for corporate America. However, carriers won't be completely left out. UPS's next trick will be choosing carriers domestically and internationally to provide the wide area wireless data services on which the company is becoming increasingly reliant.

UPS has long been one of the more progressive corporate users of mobile data technology. In 1996, before wireless LAN deployment was widespread — and several years ahead of wide area mobile data deployment — employees at the company's shipping facilities around the world started using bar code scanners capable of transmitting delivery data over an in-house, spread-spectrum wireless network.

“The idea was not to just know where a package had been in the shipping process, but to know where it is right this second,” said Dave Salzman, program manager at UPS. Salzman is the primary figure behind the company's ongoing use of wireless technology.

The in-house tracking system allowed updates to UPS's package tracking database, but it was still primitive in its own way. It didn't allow for large amounts of always-on bandwidth, and it required employees to wear a bulky scanner connected to a handheld terminal by a wire.

As Salzman sought to upgrade the system in recent years, he looked for a network technology based on common standards, which would make it easier to maintain and modify and likely less expensive to deploy than a proprietary technology. He also wanted state-of-the-art devices that would allow employees maximum mobility. Another requirement was for the in-building coverage to offer enough available data bandwidth to maintain reliability under heavy usage.

Salzman admitted that he never thought about mobile carriers as having the capability to provide that kind of in-building coverage. Instead, UPS turned to Symbol Technologies, the Bohemia, N.Y.-based company that had supplied UPS with various models of bar code scanners and other mobile computing devices since the late 1980s.

Symbol has become one of the primary vendors in the Wi-Fi revolution. Its Spectrum24 802.11b wireless LAN access points are widely deployed in enterprise environments, and the company is working on integrating its access point technology with Bluetooth short-range technology and voice-over-IP technology. In fact, Symbol led the IEEE's 802.15 working group.

“The 802.15 standard defines interoperability between an 802.11 environment and a Bluetooth environment,” said Richard Watson, director of Symbol's telephony group.

The corporate enterprise market increasingly will demand 802.15 compliance because customers want to use both wireless LAN and Bluetooth coverage without interference, Watson said. “Users are going to want all the technologies in the 2.4 GHz frequency to play nice together.”

Symbol's latest Spectrum24 access point model, the 4131, also includes a pre-802.11i standard protocol for “fast roaming” between access points, according to Watson. The new capability will help corporate users move their voice traffic onto their wireless LANs and use voice-capable 802.11 devices that won't suffer from access point authentication delays as users roam (UPS has no immediate plan to put voice traffic on its LANs, Salzman said).

These new developments ultimately would lead to important features that distinguished UPS corporate wireless LANs from those of other corporate giants.

UPS saw that it not only could build wireless LAN coverage into its 1700 office buildings, sorting hubs and distribution centers worldwide, but also that it could integrate that network coverage with Bluetooth coverage to eliminate the wire between an employee's scanner and the handheld terminal used to read the packages' bar codes. Motorola designed a customized Bluetooth device for UPS that fit on an employee's middle finger like a glove. The finger unit reads the bar code on the package and sends the data via Bluetooth transmission to a scanner worn by the employee or situated nearby. The scanner then uploaded the shipping data via the Symbol-supplied wireless LAN to the package-tracking database.

UPS liked the idea that a technology such as Bluetooth could influence the design of its package-scanning devices to such a degree that employees likely would end up being more mobile, efficient and thus productive at their jobs, Salzman said. Symbol is now installing 15,000 Spectrum24 access points in UPS's 1700 facilities, along with the 802.11b/Bluetooth integrated wireless ring scanners based on the 802.15 standard. The companies expect to finish the deployment next year.

While 55,000 employees in 1700 offices presented both a compelling and lucrative setting for wireless data innovations, UPS's 70,000 delivery truck drivers undoubtedly offered the company a more complex challenge — and an even higher-profile opportunity—for an application of mobile data technology convergence.

Since 1993, UPS delivery drivers have used mobile signature recognition devices, which customers would sign when a package was delivered to their doorsteps. The drivers would make several deliveries and then sit in their trucks for 15 minutes initiating a mobile data connection—most often based on CDPD in the U.S. — to upload the delivery confirmations to UPS's package-tracking database.

“We initially had an analog cellular terminal in each vehicle, and the driver would put the handheld scanner into the terminal like a docking station,” Salzman said. “There were a variety of different cellular modem standards worldwide, like Mobitex and Datatek, and we basically used any network that existed.”

As mobile data device capabilities and data network technologies advanced rapidly in recent years, UPS saw the opportunity to streamline their drivers' devices and standardize on fewer network protocols, he said. Last year, it upgraded the devices its European drivers used to GPRS-capable transmission terminals that also integrated signature recognition and bar code scanning functions.

“Ideally, the device could use CDMA or GPRS,” Salzman said. In fact, the GPRS device now used in Europe represents an incremental step forward to a new device that combines even more protocols — GPRS, CDMA, 802.11b, Bluetooth and even GPS. The DIAD IV, a delivery information acquisition device, is the result of more co-development work with Symbol. When it was first introduced in the spring of this year for a trial run, several industry analysts claimed they knew of no other mobile data device that offered such an array of connectivity options.

“The idea is that it will be a wide area device when the driver is making the delivery, and a wireless LAN and Bluetooth device when they are in the trucks or picking up packages at the shipping offices,” Watson said. The device uses the GPS capability to check address locations for customers receiving packages, though public network location services also could play a role as they become widely available.

Producing the device was a challenge, Watson said, because multiple connectivity capabilities can drain device power. Symbol developed a “power save” mode so the devices could turn themselves off when they aren't being used — while a driver is in traffic or eating lunch, for example.

Symbol is testing the DIAD IV this year and will widely deploy it in the next few years.

Having a variety of connectivity options is important to UPS because its drivers are always on the road. But unlike some corporations, which carriers insist need increasingly large amounts of bandwidth for richer data and video applications, UPS is far more interested in simply maintaining data coverage.

“On the road, we don't need the data throughput because we don't have those kinds of applications,” Salzman said. “What we need most is the coverage for these more opportunistic transmissions, and we'll use whatever's available.”

Still, when it comes to wide area mobile carriers, UPS is trying to keep cost and complexity down. It has put out a request for proposals in the U.S. to both CDMA and GPRS service providers. While it wants to ensure coverage from both technologies, it doesn't want to use a different carrier in every city.

“We prefer national providers,” Salzman said. The company reportedly is leaning toward AT&T Wireless for a GPRS contract. It uses T-Mobile for GPRS in Europe.

Salzman said he is hoping that carriers' obsession with moving from 2G to 3G, and their focus on promoting high-bandwidth applications, has not affected their ability to maintain consistent data coverage.

“I'm afraid that 3G has been kind of a distraction and that they haven't completed their basic coverage,” Salzman said.

While Salzman waits to find out to what degree his concern is warranted, his observation could highlight a potential shortcoming in carriers' vaunted strategies to win more corporate mobile data business: With very few exceptions, most of the largest mobile carriers in the U.S. are of the opinion that when it comes to mobile data applications, corporate enterprise customers are bandwidth hungry — that they desire loads of capacity to support multiple advanced data and visual applications. Salzman believes that what those users need most from their wireless service providers right now is assurance that they will have reliable data connectivity.

“You still see a lot of dropped calls out there,” he said. “And coverage is so important for our drivers on the road.”