More Control, Better Insights, Less Hassle: How Organizations Can Gain a Competitive Advantage With the P.180 Connectivity Platform

More Control, Better Insights, Less Hassle: How Organizations Can Gain a Competitive Advantage With the P.180 Connectivity Platform

Brian Rowley

Panasonic Mobility has built its reputation on listening to the demands and needs of customers – and what we’ve heard in recent months and years is that connectivity needs are evolving. An ever growing number of organizations are looking for a one-stop hardware and wireless solution that keeps their mobile workforces connected across global borders and puts them in control of their data plans and activations.

Panasonic recently unveiled a seamless global connectivity service for Toughbook products called P.180. Designed for organizations with global, mobile workforces, this service offers seamless, high-speed connectivity across more than 180 countries with predictable pricing and no roaming fees.  This new service delivers a competitive advantage to organizations of all size, with a scalable solution that grants unparalleled control over wireless connectivity and is conveniently available as part of a “one-stop shop” with Panasonic Toughbook hardware.

P.180 marks the next chapter in the Panasonic Toughbook® story –continuing our legacy of redefining rugged mobility and equipping today’s evolving and dynamic mobile workforce.

To learn more about what Toughbook customers can expect from P.180, I sat down with Victoria Obenshain, vice president of wireless strategy.

What can customers expect from P.180 versus service from traditional wireless carriers?

Seamless, Global Connectivity: Traditionally, organizations with a global footprint have needed to juggle multiple contracts and relationships within each region to ensure connectivity. Employees travelling abroad were forced to rack up pricey, unpredictable roaming fees to stay online and juggle with switching SIM cards. With P.180, customers get true global, seamless connectivity – with the ability to add service in countries with a click of the mouse using our robust management portal.

Unparalleled Control and Insights:Similarly, through the management portal, P.180 customers have full control of their data usage and an ability to tailor their plan to their immediate needs. This means no time wasted working through a carrier to get employees and teams up and running quickly. The management portal also delivers deep analytics and insights into how workers are staying connected and using their devices, allowing customers to identify technology and connectivity challenges and solve them directly.  

Competitive, Predictable Pricing:Being able to personalize the plan to the needs of each individual organization really is the heart of the P.180 service. In addition to being able to easily add service options through the management portal.   A Panasonic P.180 pricing specialist will work with you and analyze the needs of your workforce to create the most cost effective P.180 plan for your needs.

Traditionally, Panasonic has been seen as a hardware provider – why did the company decide that launching a connectivity service was the right move?

Two big factors made us feel like this was the right move for our customers and the right move for Panasonic.

1. Evolving To Meet Customer Needs: We’ve built our name on responding to the ever changing nature of our customers’ work demands. With an increasing number of mobile workers spread out across geographies – especially in the transportation and logistics sectors – we knew that meeting their evolving connectivity needs was the logical next step in better equipping our customers to get work done. More and more we heard from our customers that they needed seamless and secure global connectivity to keep up with the direction their industries were headed. With P.180, we’re responding to that demand by delivering a unique service offering that offers them a competitive edge.

2. Two Decades of Wireless Innovation:Panasonic was the first OEM to embed wireless connectivity in rugged mobile devices and ever since has been a leader in wireless innovations. Our R&D teams are consistently leading the way in outfitting our hardware with the latest connectivity technologies. When we began our Toughbook series over twenty years ago, we foresaw just how important mobile connectivity would be for the future of work. This is why we were the first company to embed wireless connectivity into rugged mobile devices and it’s why we’re now leading the way with a reimagining of what connectivity service can offer in P.180.

How will customers benefit from P.180 being added to the Panasonic Toughbook ecosystem?

For years, our customers have looked to Panasonic to offer right-sized solutions for their technology challenges. And, in 2017, one of those challenges is finding a streamlined but robust connectivity offering. At its heart, P.180 offers convenience – a one-stop shop for all of your connectivity needs, no matter the size of your organization. Paired with trusted hardware, P.180 simplifies buying decisions and makes it easier than ever to get a global, mobile workforce up and running. Our customers know us for our unparalleled service, and with P.180, each customer gets a partner who understands their needs intuitively and is able to offer rapid, customized solutions to help overcome the challenges they face. Beyond that, P.180 offers fast connectivity worldwide that can be set up directly from any supported Toughbook device quickly and easily.

Beyond keepings workers connected, what other benefits does P.180 deliver to Panasonic customers?

When we designed P.180, we wanted to put as much control in the hands of our users as possible. We know that workforces and their needs change, and our customers don’t want to go through a middleman when they need to add or remove someone from a network, change permissions or add features.

To solve that problem, P.180 includes a customized Management Portal that ensures that customers are in control of their P.180 experience. This robust portal allows them to manage access to the network in fine detail but also delivers deep analytics and insights into how workers are staying connected and using their devices, allowing customers to identify technology and connectivity challenges and solve them directly.

The Panasonic P.180 launches in the fourth quarter of 2017. Visit us online for more information on how your organization can get work done with Panasonic P.180.

 

 

The Internet of Vehicles

the-internet-of-vehicles

The Internet of Vehicles

3 minutes

As innovation accelerates, it isn’t hard to imagine a world where cars drive themselves, or even fly. But cars that talk and think? You might be shaking your head, but that’s exactly where mobility is headed.

At ITS World Congress that starts in mid-September in Copenhagen, Panasonic’s Jarrett Wendt will offer ideas on the connected vehicle ecosystem enabling cars to communicate with each other and the road around them. If your travels don’t include Denmark in September, here are a few highlights.

The world is changing at hyper speed

As anyone in the tech world understands, disruption is the new normal. Constant innovation is now the price of entry, and the rate of change is increasing exponentially. Adoption rates have also accelerated dramatically. As inventor and futurist and Ray Kurzweil noted, we won’t experience 100 years of progress in this century – at today’s accelerated pace, it will be more like 20,000 years worth.

In our recent “Moving Forward,” research series, Panasonic Corp. of North America assesses how senior technology decision makers in industries including automotive view the technologies they see driving us forward, and the impact of these technologies on future plans. By 2025, 10 disruptive technologies are expected to generate trillions of dollars of economic impact. Our new research reveals that tech decision makers in automotive, avionics industries and related government agencies say their companies have already adopted five of these technologies on average. And four have risen to the top of their innovation agendas – energy storage, autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence and sustainable energy. Panasonic is deeply engaged in all of them.

The future of transportation is integrated

There has been a great deal of prototyping and testing of Intelligent Transportation Systems, but working with the Colorado Dept. of Transportation, Panasonic has developed a phased approach that will allow DOTs to effectively deploy these technologies at scale. Not just a system for main highways and thoroughfares, but for all roadways and arteries throughout an entire state or region.

Our role? A technology-agnostic strategic consultant, general contractor and solution integrator.

We’re one year into our real-world deployment along a particularly challenging 90 mile stretch of I-70 in Colorado, connecting Denver to Vail, where Coloradans face steep grades, severe curves, often-extreme weather, visibility and congestion difficulties. This is a 5-year, $72 million V2X program featuring a road-operator managed data platform deployed on active, open roadways.

Data has the power to drive safety

With our Intelligent Transportation solution, we’re talking about empowering DOTs with the ability to analyze everything from speed and heading, to windshield wiper and traction control status – providing valuable context on road conditions.

Suddenly, a roadway operator can receive this data and make up-to-the-minute decisions about deploying snowplows during winter storms – or optimize how traffic flows through the city in real time.

This technology can also communicate instantly about emergency braking and crashes, and enables customized alerts to be sent to cars in specific locations instantaneously.

Imagine driving along the highway in the mountains and a crash occurs 1,000 feet down the road and around a blind turn. V2X will enable our vehicles to warn us or even react on our behalf – to prevent us from becoming a part of the incident even before the compromised vehicle is visible. And emergency services can be deployed more expeditiously, and more cost-effectively, than ever before.

Talking cars can reduce traffic

Connected vehicle technology will save lives through a significant reduction in the number of non-impaired crashes – estimates are as high as 80%. CDOT estimates as much as a 400% increase in roadway efficiency with wide scale deployment of connected vehicle technology – without the expense of widening roadways and adding lanes. The system is also expected to reduce the amount of time people spend in traffic and lessen the environmental impact of idling cars by mitigating congestion.

Read more about how disruptive technology is impacting transportation in The Year of the Smart Highway.

Authors
Tom Gebhardt - Chairman and CEO, Panasonic Corporation of North America

Building a wireless future that is far-reaching and accessible

Future of Bluetooth Mesh Networks

Building a wireless future that is far-reaching and accessible

4 minutes

The most inspiring example of the power of mesh networks, a distributed communication system, where each device acts as a node that can relay data to the others, lies in the island of Puerto Rico. That’s where a couple of volunteers with antennas, wireless mesh devices and solar panels helped to restore communications for relief effort coordinators in Barranquitas, a city battered by Hurricane Maria. “Within three days, volunteers were using both technologies to more effectively coordinate the delivery of food and medicine,” according to an article in Quartz.

Disaster management and public safety is one reason for the strong growth forecast for the global wireless mesh network market, but not the only one, according to a new report by Zion Market Research. Its study finds that the global wireless mesh network market was valued at $3.84 billion in 2017 and is expected to reach around $9.08 billion by 2024. The oil & gas Industry, video streaming and surveillance, smart mobility and smart city applications are among the biggest drivers of growth of mesh networking thanks to its promise of low-cost access to broadband services.

Bluetooth 5.0 was officially deployed in 2016 with a focus on enhancing the range, speed and data capacity for the connections. It also had another promising role: IoT connectivity. Where Bluetooth had previously been thought of as a 1-to-1 connection between devices, this concentration on IoT tech allows for the connection of multiple devices and, ultimately, the cloud.

Recent research on disruptive technology by Panasonic shows that many companies have adopted mobile devices, apps and commerce and the cloud, and three in five have adopted the Internet of Things (IoT). Senior tech decision makers believe these technologies are critical to their future success, according to our research. Clearly developments, such as mesh networking, that yield fruitful deployments of disruptive technology are important to these decision makers.

Wide-ranging applications

Bluetooth mesh network represents a major step towards a more accessible and wide-ranging wireless future. It allows for multiple devices to connect to the same network and all communicate seamlessly and in real time. A standard Bluetooth network is similar to a speaker presenting to an audience. The speaker may address the entire audience or individual members and audience members may address a question to the speaker, but audience members don’t communicate among themselves. In a Bluetooth mesh network audience members may address one another. This topology has two advantages. First, since a single message may travel along many routes to its destination, this dramatically increases the probability that the message arrives. The second advantage is the increased distance a message may travel – like one audience member speaking to another.

While standard Bluetooth recently upgraded its range in the Bluetooth 5.0 update, mesh networking hypothetically allows for infinite range if the proper chain links are in place.

Mesh networks in healthcare

There are pioneering Bluetooth mesh network examples in healthcare. Hospitals are using Bluetooth beacons to monitor and track equipment. But helping nurses locate equipment is just the surface of Bluetooth’s capabilities in the health system. Using this tech, doctors and nurses could monitor patients from anywhere, significantly reducing the need for hospital visits. These visits are both costly and potentially dangerous due to the risk of things like contagious diseases and infection. Not only would a doctor or nurse be able to monitor patients wirelessly, but a patient’s devices at home could do things like monitor temperature through biometric sensors and automatically notify the drug store to deliver medicine if the patient got a fever.

Benefits to manufacturing

There are also clear benefits from the Bluetooth mesh network in the manufacturing sector, especially where multiple machines operate simultaneously on the plant floor. Previously, if two devices situated beyond the range of a Bluetooth device needed to communicate, it would require either a wired connection or gateway that could connect to the cloud. This cloud connection requires Wi-Fi, which uses significantly more energy. Now with the mesh network, every single device in the entire factory can connect to each other via Bluetooth, and even the ones farthest away can communicate if necessary by bouncing the signal through other devices on the way.

Bluetooth mesh networking is just one piece of the wireless future that is to come. Read more in our Future of Wireless Everything series. 

Authors
Jeff Howell - President of Panasonic Industrial Devices Sales Company of America