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Who's afraid of GPRS ? (GPRS for the uninitiated)
With all the hype of 3G most people have heard about GPRS. Without delving into the world of GSM and telecoms - GPRS is just another transport. As far as the Application Programmer is concerned, once a GRPS connection is in place a mobile device is in effect connected to the net, it has an IP address and can open and accept socket connections. Obviously the same restrictions related to firewalls apply equally to mobile devices as they do to desktop clients. Another restriction which may apply is the Access Point Node or APN. An APN is the GPRS equivalent of a firewall or proxy which can limit or restrict the type of traffic that can be sent over a GPRS channel.
Most network operators also have an "open" APN which allows unrestricted traffic. Another feature of GPRS which can be problematic is the fact that mobile devices normally get a dynamically assigned IP address (i.e. DHCP). While this may be efficient for the network operator it can play havoc for Application Programmers as it may be impossible to accurately determine the mobile device's IP address. Due to the possibility of losing signal within GSM networks, there is the added headache that the IP address can also change unexpectedly. As long as the mobile device initiate connections (and reconnections) this should not cause problems however.
Finally some network operators often favour voice channels over data channels so be warned that you may have problems getting a GPRS connection in heavily loaded cells in the first place.
Mobile Devices - The new client-side frontier
In recent years the client side has been undergoing a second revolution. The technology front has been pushed further back into client territory. The mobile workforce, using small handheld mobile devices is for the first time interacting dynamically with backend systems, the effect of which is that there is little or no data latency and as a result data is always current and up to date.
The implications of this may seem minor, but the potential rate at which business can be conducted can no doubt increase several fold, reducing turnaround times and as a result improving the efficiency of a business e.g. orders taken on mobile devices can potentially be filled within minutes of the order actually been placed. Orders can be shipped and invoices printed even before the sales representative has actually left the building!
What is the cost of operating on stale or inconsistent data ? The right hand may not know what the left hand is doing. If information being gathered in the field is immediately available throughout an organisation, the implications should be profound in terms of organisational efficiency and cost effectiveness.
Why Wireless LANs could get you in trouble
I recently chaired a Wireless LAN Security Conference in Dublin. One of the more interesting things I learned over the two days concerned the Data Protection Act and Wireless LAN technology.
In short, one of the speakers pointed out that if a business using Wireless LAN technology doesn't enable suitable security mechanisms, it might accidentally expose customer or partner data on the network to passing intruders. Aside from all the obvious ramifications of this, one potential legal aside is that the business could fall foul of the Data Protection Act (DPA), which requires this kind of data to be kept secure.
This cast an interesting light on a presentation from another speaker, who presented a long list of open and insecure Access Points that were discovered by WarDriving through Dublin. It raised the theoretical possiblity of the companies that owned these access points being open to prosecution under the DPA. New technology is often good news for lawyers :-)