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Applying Technology to solve your problems.
 
 

Dorset goes global

From the Sunday Times, 18 November 2001
BY GARETH HUW DAVIES
 
Software consultant Ian Burton works a world away from Silicon Valley, and several wearying driving hours from the shiny, high-tech environment of the Thames Valley. His beat is the pretty villages and small towns of Dorset, which many might have thought was one of the last areas in England to connect to the world superhighway.
 
And yet, using equipment costing less than £1,500, Burton can demonstrate to potential clients in the remotest village any resource he wants to call down from the internet. No wires. All he needs is a mobile phone signal.
 
Working with Enterprise Connection, the enterprise, research and development division of Weymouth College, on Prince Charles’s estate at Poundbury, near Dorchester, Burton and his company Aptek Consulting have helped connect a small rural community to the world. He is enabling apparently parochial small businesses to become potential global concerns by means of a device just 10mm thick and weighing 57 grams. It is called the Nokia Card Phone and costs a little more than £200.
 
The Card Phone simply plugs into a standard laptop and works over the Orange network using a technology called High Speed Circuit Switched Data to boost its network ability to handle data. HSCSD works by reserving more than one channel for the connection and pumping the data over routes not needed for voice. By lumping together channels, Orange can boost the speed data is received at to 28.8kbps per second. This is far faster than the 9.6kbps possible with standard mobile phones, if behind the 56.6kbps mustered by the fastest PC modems.
 
“As long as I can get a mobile phone signal,” says Burton, “I can talk to my computer systems back in the office, and to any internet site or server that is exposed to the internet. Our consultants spend much of their time on the road visiting clients, but they still require access to the company IT infrastructure so they can read critical files, work on client systems or use e-mail. Most of the stuff we download is a couple of kilobytes. It doesn’t take long. But even if somebody has a problem with a database and we have to download a 3mb or 4mb database file, then it can be done — and all on a mobile phone. You just have to make sure that you are stationary and you can get some altitude for the signal.
 
“We use the Card Phone plus ordinary, bog-standard mobiles and laptops costing £1,000,” he adds. “It’s a viciously straightforward and simple solution we’re talking about here.”
 
Empowering the Dorset community is one of the functions of Enterprise Connection. Its director, Simon Mauger, takes up the story: “We have fairly sophisticated technical facilities here at Poundbury — we have large video-conferencing systems, our own video multipoint bridge and an information technology centre. Out of here we have carried through a whole raft of projects to develop various ways of using mobile technologies.
 
“We do about 160 business start-ups a year, from the predictable small tourist business in this area, right the way through to video-conferencing with major firms. Recently, we connected 24 villages to broadband.”
 
Burton made contact with Enterprise Connection when he set up Aptek Consulting in 1999, soon after completing an assignment with the AA. “I was part of a small team who wrote its call handling system and I decided it was time to go it alone. We wanted to do the proper software engineering job for small and medium-size businesses, and bring their websites alive.”
 
Burton took the government’s Technology Means Business (TMB) course, accredited through Enterprise Connection. Armed with this qualification he was able to drive off into the byways of Dorset to visit clients. It was Enterprise Connection, through a programme it is running with Orange, that provided him with the Nokia Card Phone. The funding of the project allows every accredited adviser to be given a PC with a Card Phone. “We thought it would be good if the advisers we were accrediting had technology that would help them a little bit, so they could work anywhere without worrying about connectivity and be easier to get at,” says Mauger.
 
“We struggle because we are small, and not the glitzy suit brigade,” says Burton. “But now I can say to a client, ‘Have you thought of this solution?’ — then demonstrate on my laptop via my mobile something we did earlier back at the office. Or I can call something down from the internet, and say, ‘Hey, it’s as easy as this’.”
 
According to Burton, it is a great help being able to demonstrate equipment on site, even where clients have their own digital exchanges that are not directly compatible. “With mobile phone connectivity you are not tied to a telephone socket. You can save a packet of money through these solutions,” he adds. “A small Dorset-based marine PR company we did some work for can now publish competition results and update press releases on its website from anywhere in the world, using this technology. All its needs is a mobile phone signal.
 
“They had been shown another system which uses some of the most advanced technology in the world — fantastic stuff, but quite unnecessary.
 
“This allows the small companies to be completely global — they can market globally, get information out globally and also, if they have a person doing business on the other side of the world, they can communicate with the office immediately.”
 
Enterprise Connection was set up at Poundbury as the result of collaboration between the Duchy of Cornwall, West Dorset Council, South and West Dorset Economic Partnership and Weymouth College, among others. Its aim is to “develop networks to successfully trade within e-commerce and education and to evolve virtual communities; to provide advice, consultancy, resources and support in ICT for the community.”
 
Mauger sees great possibilities for projects based on mobile phone connectivity. “For example, we can use the Card Phone to demonstrate the internet to learners out in the community. In the past we needed a fixed point; you had to go to somewhere to receive instruction whenever IT was involved. Now we have the possibility of mobile online classrooms in the villages, the ‘learning van’ idea, where connection to the internet would otherwise be impossible.”
 
Enterprise Connection already runs video-conferencing from fixed sites, as well as psychometric testing and counselling by video-link. But video-conferencing facilities in companies are often busy and expensive. 3G mobile video phone technology will soon allow an individual to access a counsellor by video link in total privacy.