Here’s our explanation and our understanding of the concept which you may find is different to how other companies explain it. We’ll leave it to you to wonder why.

‘Pull’ technology

The term ‘Pull’ technology comes from the remote device ‘pulling’ data from the server it has been set up to synchronize with. This would normally be achieved via a GSM dial-up account that synchronises the device with a designated server. Once synchronized, the device then ‘pulls’ the data off the server and onto the designated remote device.

The perceived down-side to ‘pull’ technology is the remote device is never aware of any data waiting on the server to be collected. Head-office can allocate a task or job or whatever to the device, but the device never knows head-office has done so. The next time the remote device operator instigates a connection with the server, it will automatically ‘pull’ down any new data sat on the server onto the device. The device can be programmed to sync with the server every hour, or every three hours or whenever you choose. Some companies don’t need the data as soon as it’s created, some do, which is why you must carefully consider which option is best for your business.

‘Push’ technology

Utopia for most companies is they allocate a job to a device and that specific job simply appears on the designated device within a matter of seconds or at most a couple of minutes of that job being sent to the device. This is achieved without the user of the remote device having any interaction with the device whatsoever

For this to be achieved, both the back-office system and the remote device in question must have an open gateway available and ‘on’ to send and receive data at all times. GPRS technology provides this ‘always on’ capability which allows data to be moved in both directions without having to instigate manual server synchronizations as in the ‘pull’ technology mentioned earlier.

So in theory, the ‘pushing’ of data to remote devices can be achieved so long as the remote device is turned on and has an open ‘always on’ link to the head-office back-office system.

There are however a number ways in which this concept can fail.

• If the GPRS signal is lost
• If the device is not switched on
• If the PDA application is not running

In the real world, true ‘push’ technology is very difficult to achieve, and in most cases is not achieved in the way some companies may tell you. In a lot of cases, the remote device is set up to ‘pull’ data from the designated server every ten or fifteen seconds or so. This gives the illusion of ‘push’ as the data will appear on the remote device within say two minutes of the data being sent from head-office, but in reality it’s a ‘pull’.

We appreciate this may be confusing, but while you go through your decision making process, you really should obtain total clarity as to how your data will be transmitted, it’s robustness, it’s transfer protocol the amount of data used to send the 'job' and how the device interacts with the server.

For the avoidance of doubt, Mobile Data Gateway do offer 'Push' technology.