Almost every system we run for the fleet assumes that a van will spend part of its day out of contact. Handsets store deliveries and send them when they find a signal. Route plans are loaded in the morning and treated as fixed. Changes during the day go by phone. On parts of our routes in the hills a van can go four or five hours without coverage.
This summer we fitted twenty vans on those routes with satellite terminals, as a trial, mainly so that proof of delivery would arrive on the same day. It did, and then everything else began to move.
Within a month the planners were asking to move stops between vans in the middle of a route, because now they could see every van and reach it. Customer services wanted to give customers arrival times from each van's live position instead of the morning's plan. The vehicle manufacturer offered to push software updates to the vans overnight in the yard and, for a fee, while they were parked at lunch. And our security lead pointed out that twenty vans now had a permanent internet connection that went through none of our firewalls.
I think this is where connectivity is heading for any company that runs vehicles. Satellite connections to ordinary phones and modems are arriving over the next few years, and the coverage gaps our systems were designed around will mostly close. When they do, a van stops being a device that reports in at the end of the day and becomes a site on our network, one of about nine hundred, travelling at fifty miles an hour.
We are planning for that now. Each trial van is registered in our network inventory as a site, with a connection policy and a path to our services through our own security controls. We are agreeing with fleet and the drivers' representatives what a van may receive while it is moving, because a route change read at a red light is a safety question. And the planning interface is being rebuilt so that a route can change during the day.
For twenty years the dead zones on our routes had quietly been part of our change control. Once a route left the yard, nobody could interfere with it. Within a few years, anybody with access to the planning screen will be able to.
– Serguey Shinder
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