Rabitt I think you have trouble processing information.
Of course you think that. You're a dispatcher, and are doing a fine job in reinforcing the stereotypes that everyone here has of dispatchers.
Rabitt? Really?
Lets try this. Uh, Google maps is not live nobody said it was.
No, but you did say,
"...if you are on satellite GPS phones, we know which parking space you are in," which, unless you have a live picture or live video, is a load of crap.
I cannot see "Your truck" on google maps unless you were there like 5 years ago. Didnt say I could.
No, you didn't. But what you did say was,
"We zoom in on google maps your location, and we can tell you what gas pump you are at," and that's a load of crap, too, because you can't.
Now I must explain what I can see so you can put your crayons away and start using some coloring pencils.
Wow, an insult from a
real dispatcher. That hurt.
I see a ping of a location of your truck at x time approx 3 minutes ago. I click on it. Google maps opens, with a green f**king arrow pointing at where it came from. You zoom in. You zoom in more. You zoom in even farther than Rabitt can.
Two points here. One, I know how Google Maps and Google Earth work, and I know how far anyone can zoom in. I know that the new Geoeye satellite has half a meter resolution, but that the images on Google from that satellite are still an incredibly small percentage, and are mostly of very specific locations requested by news and human rights organizations. (couple of kewl examples
here, and
here).
Two, you know how when someone is deadheading (that means driving while empty, with no freight on the truck) and they say they are hauling dispatcher brains? It's because most dispatchers don't know how to spell rabbit.
And you can see where your driver is. Now, heres a little trick, yeah, its not always completely accurate.
Well, accurate down to an individual parking space or an individual fuel pump, tho. <snort>
We use sprint as a gps phone service. We have sprint.com open at all times. We can tell how many bars of service the GPS phone has where it is at. Be carefull Rabbit, you might really get confused here. Our phones are set up to be anywhere from 3 to 20 feet of accuracy. Sprint tells us that 5 bars is 3 feet, 4 bars is 8 feet, 3 bars is 14 feet, 2 bars is 17 to 20 feet, and 1 bar is not going to ping. If the green arrow is actually a green circle, then it is outside of the 20ft. range.
Don't worry, I won't get confused here, either. I know how GPS works on a cell phone, and what the bars of signal strength mean. You can have just 2 bars on a cell signal, but still have as high as 3 feet of GPS accuracy, and you can have 4 or 5 bars and have little as 50 feet of GPS accuracy. You need a minimum of two cell towers to assist the GPS chip to triangulate the phone's position, and you can do that to within just a few feet even with a single bar. But even with 5 bars, if there's just a single cell tower the phone can see, then no triangulation can be made, and the phone's position is determined solely by the WAAS chip in the phone. The number of bars is solely to measure the db signal strength of the radio signal, nothing more.
But regardless, the average accuracy of a cell phone which is assisted by cell tower triangulation is 19.7 feet. Sometimes it's 3 feet, sometimes it's 50 feet. To get a
consistent average which is more accurate than that, you need a phone (and a supporting carrier) that uses Real Time Kinematic Carrier-Phase Enhancement, and I don't know of a single cell phone carrier that uses RTK satellite navigation. It's what land and hydrographic surveyors use, and it ain't cheap, certainly not cheap enough to throw into a cell phone.
And about the traffic qualcom etc. stuff, I know all of this, but I was simply proving a point. Maybe I shouldnt have said ALL carriers record their calls.
Apparently, the point was to try and make people believe something that is not true.
I should have said all REAL carriers record their calls,
I know a couple of CEO's at REAL carriers who would strongly disagree with that statement.
...and no it is not used to threaten or even really used against the drivers, and yes everyone is informed everytime they call in. But us dispatchers tend to have drivers with poor memory or say "nobody told me that" and every call is time stamped with the phone number and date and time and immediately downloaded to a mp3 file on our computers. So we can just click the file and it plays for us.
Some carriers might do it that way, but most don't. Those who are ISO 9001:2008 will do things a bit differently.
Is it expensive? Hell no. To start up? Expensive. Something like $700 for the software, phones, Ethernet lines, etc. Builds you a nice installation and setup fee. Monthly is about $90.00/mo.
I suppose you are right. I don't know anything about computer hardware, TCP/IP networking, RAID-6 servers, Symmetrix DMX SAN and NAS arrays, or dedicated PC-integrated multi-user, multi-channel call recorders with database integration that satisfy several ISO Quality Management tracking requirements for easy and accurate retrieval that even a medium sized carrier would need.
Look, I appreciate that you are excited about your job, I really do, and that you are lovin' the neat keen supercool and groovy technology and the pseudo power you think you have, but please don't come in here and think you can snow a bunch of dumb expediters who don't know where freight comes from or how it all works. The the majority of users on this site are not exactly your average, dumb-as-bricks, moron truck drivers who are panting for the elusive "insider" information on the expediting biz. Most are very experienced and know very well where freight comes from, the rates they go for, and how it all works. Some are their own dispatchers with their own authority and are looking at the very same boards that you are, and are bidding against you. Some in here are actual CEOs and owners of carriers.
There are certainly other expediting Web sites out there, but this one is in the deep end of the pool. This is something you may want to keep in mind for future reference.
river where are you?
