New router brings unshakeable connectivity to police cars and ambulances
The rationale behind the OpSec project and Goodmill, the SME that engineered it, is simple yet difficult to argue against: as much as users want the “killer app” that will meet their requirements, such killer app is only as good as the mobile network it’s depending on. Only flawless connectivity can fit the bill. This is particularly true for Public Safety and Security (PSS) professionals such as police officers or paramedics, who have no choice but to rely on telecommunications to guarantee their personal safety and that of the people they serve. In such context, connectivity can be a matter of life and death. “There are more and more mobile applications enabling safer and more efficient operations for PSS, and these keep growing in importance. We at Goodmill saw a gap in the market, and believe that closing it requires much more than putting an office router into a vehicle and expecting it to work. Our solution is designed, engineered and optimised for the mobile wireless challenge,” says Petteri Suomalainen, founder and CEO of Goodmill. Goodmill’s router combines dedicated and commercial networks with WiFi and other routes of data transfer to achieve up to 99.9 % availability. It can be installed in a vehicle with only basic knowledge of networking. Say an ambulance is driving at 180 km/h in an emergency mission: the router can be used to send the likes of online ECG information and get real-time instructions from hospital staff to give special emergency treatment to the patient. A police officer, on the other hand, would find the system useful when stopping a car. With Goodmill, an online database request can be made to check for criminal record or gun registration based on plate number. The router is packed with innovative features, one of the most important being mobile-IP tunnelling, which ensures a smooth transition between networks. “Mobile-IP completely insulates the higher layers – apps and services – from the “messy details” of the underlying radio networks. Besides, our quality estimation and link selection algorithms can work hand-in-hand with Mobile-IP to ensure that the most appropriate link is in use at all times. Lately, we even optimised multiple link capacities and simultaneously took care of application prioritisation challenges. With this we make sure that most important data are always delivered,” Mr Suomalainen explains. The company hopes to reach a 20 % market share by 2020 and has already sold equipment to national roll-outs in Finland, Norway, Iceland, Kuwait and Qatar, where thousands of Goodmill routers are now in use. With OpSec, Mr Suomalainen and his team focused on improving the technology to reflect the recent increase in the need for data capacities and the need for more modern security features. They also focused on developing US-specific features which would fulfil the needs of that market. “Our market segment is loyal and global, but conservative in their processes. Public safety decision making is sometimes very bureaucratic and it is impossible to make the decision a critical one, despite the urgent need for the capabilities we provide. With this funding, we could address totally new and promising markets that would not have been otherwise possible to enter, such as Mexico, Canada and the USA,” Mr Suomalainen concludes.
Keywords
OpSec, router, ambulance, police, mobile network, coverage, Goodmill, availability
