Water data flow accelerated - Wireless

Turlock Irrigation District field representatives, known as water distribution operators (WDOs), control the delivery of water to 5,800 individual parcels of land. All WDOs must know exactly how much water is flowing in their delivery canals at any given time-to avoid spillage and to coordinate the use of chemicals that control plant growth in the canal system.

Although there was a telemetry system in place that measured the irrigation-system water flow, the water-flow information was only available to PCs inside the corporate network--to which WDOs in the field did not have access. "The WDO who was standing next to a water gate had less information about that gate than someone back at the office looking at a PC with the telemetry application," says Kavarian. TID needed a cost-effective solution that was mobile but secure, robust enough for field use and required minimal training.

TID's IS department implemented a mobile, Web-enabled cellular phone solution using the Cisco CTE 1400 Series Content Transformation Engine. Based on technology from application mobility solution provider Net6, San Jose, CA, the CTE 1400, transforms existing HTML and XML applications for interaction with mobile devices, such as Web-enabled cellular phones, wireless personal digital assistants, two-way pagers and IP screen telephones. The purchase was less than $25,000 and meshed with the WDOs' existing cellular phones.

TID's telemetry system provides an HTML client for PC access to the water distribution data. "Using the point-and-dick development environment of the CTE 1400 Design Studio, it took me less than a day to transform the entire telemetry application into a cellular phone-compatible wireless application protocol format," says Andrew Postma, TID systems analyst. The rules were loaded into the CTE 1400 and are used whenever a WDO uses a WAP phone to access the telemetry application.

"The mobile solution is practical, secure and robust, and was deployed to the 30 users, plus management, in less time and at less cost than a trial system serving only four users," says Wayne Turnbow, TID information services operations manager. "With our original solution, we would have accrued monthly Internet costs for each WDO. The cost of cell-phone coverage compared to Internet access is one-third the cost of the laptop accounts we had been considering."

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