BGAN Helps Omnipage Track Medical Vehicles for Sporting Events

Every year, the one-day Cape Argus Cycle Tour draws some 35,000 competitors to the Cape Peninsula of South Africa for a 109 km race, the largest individually timed cycling event in the world. For the past five years, Omnipage has been supplying medical and logistical support vehicles for the Tour with radio communications to monitor their location at all times. “The ultimate goal is to ensure the safety of competitors and spectators,” says Roy van Schoor, Managing Director.

“For the Argus, we run about 100 medical vehicles including ambulances, response vehicles, quads and motorbikes with doctors or paramedics, even an emergency helicopter,” says van Schoor. “With the sheer number of cyclists involved, it’s an absolute certainty there will be accidents— some of them fairly serious, such as bone fractures and things like that.” Of 73 start groups in the 2009 race, for example, only two made it through the first 100 meters without someone crashing. “When an emergency occurs,” he adds, “we need to dispatch the nearest medical team as quickly as possible. To do that, we need real-time vehicle tracking.”

Originally Omnipage tracked medical vehicles via radio. Each team had to call in its position to the mobile command centre, which manually updated a digital mapping system. A few years ago, Omnipage began equipping vehicles with SportsTrack GPS units that transmitted each vehicle’s ID, position, speed and time in a small data packet through the GSM network to a tracking server online. Also using GSM, Omnipage’s command centre accessed the server over the Internet, updating the map automatically. But there were problems.

The command vehicle is normally stationed at the finish line or end of each day’s leg, often in a small town with insufficient cellular capacity. “As contestants cross the finish line, they start making calls and the GSM system gets swamped,” explains van Schoor. “Because voice traffic takes priority over data, vehicle tracking lagged as much as 30 to 40 minutes behind their actual location at times— which is totally unacceptable in a medical emergency. That’s when we said, ‘We’ve got to find another way to do this!’”

After doing their homework and researching various solutions, BGAN from Stratos was identified as the best option for Omnipage. Through Stratos, Omnipage now has a cost-effective tracking solution incorporating BGAN with conventional GSM. “The GPS units still use cellular to feed tracking data from the vehicles to the server,” says van Schoor. “Even though we lose GSM in some remote valleys and mountains, we usually have at least 85 percent coverage out on the course, and the system doesn’t get overloaded the way it does back in town. In our mobile command centre, we now use the BGAN terminal to download tracking data from the Internet – totally independent of the cellular systems. So no amount of voice traffic can bog it down.

“The BGAN works beautifully,” he observes. “Tracking with BGAN is so much more reliable and consistent than GSM. It’s a quantum leap in performance.” Not only is data access through BGAN faster and more reliable, according to van Schoor, it’s also very easy to use. “We put the terminal on the roof of the caravan, plug in the cables, and quickly aim it at the satellite. Probably takes two or three minutes, and we’re in business. All round, BGAN works really well. It’s a fantastic asset.”

The final end-product was a true managed- solution for the customer, which included Iridium and BGAN technology to deliver complete and uninterrupted access to critical data. In addition, Omnipage utilized Stratos Dashboard, part of the Stratos Advantage suite of services to keep a close eye on airtime usage, and status of their various Iridium, and BGAN terminals. For the customer, the total solution delivers the capability to respond more rapidly to emergencies and save lives.