Finally worthy of the Name?
It’s kind of in our name, but one would expect that a business called ImmoTrack Online might have GPS trackers which are always, well, online! However, if you’re an ImmoTrack Online customer, you may often access the portal and ask yourself why your vehicle isn’t online all the time.
Green = Good! Red = Boooo
Living in an imperfect environment…
The reality of operating a business that relies on mobile network providers such as Telstra, Optus, and Vodafone means that we are sometimes at the mercy of how these providers manage mobile network congestion. During quiet periods, things run like a well-oiled machine but during peak periods, the mobile network operators can start managing their load by doing some rather nasty sounding things like “TCP Session Reaping” (Yikes!) which can make our trackers temporarily disconnect from our server and appear offline. This is what’s happening when you access our portal and your vehicle has that red text and “X minutes ago” status. It’s frustrating because you may ask yourself why. Why is it offline? Has the GPS tracker been found and the car stolen? Did the GPS tracker fail? One single status that could be due to many different factors including “Telstra just being mean” is No Bueno.
… whilst improving your experience!
Even though we live with the limitations imposed on us by the mobile networks, we constantly work to improve how ImmoTrack Online meets the promise of our name.
We do what we can to make all this invisible to you, but getting this right is an extremely complex act, and in our view it is a major part of what makes us different. Let’s be clear here: anybody can spin up a GPS tracking business with really basic data, hiding from their customers what the state of their vehicles are. And indeed, the poor reponse times and general “lag” of vehicle status is a major gripe for many users of GPS tracking services. Our customers regularly tell us that we’re much more up to date and faster to respond. But we always want to do better.
And to that, we can announce that we have made material improvements to vehicle status and ability to manage your GPS tracker in realtime!
More consistent Online
Rolling out before the end of 2025, all GPS trackers will report as online nearly all of the time. We can’t stop the mobile network operators from occasionally interfering with that, but we’re pretty confident that most of the time you go to use your mobile app or our web portal, your vehicles will be online**. Score!
And Better Response Times to commands
Also rolling out at the same time is “automated wake” when you send a command. If you send a command to your GPS tracker, and it just-so-happens to be marked as offline when you do, we now automatically send a wake command via an SMS message to the tracker so that your commands are sent immediately. No more need to send a “Wake Tracker” command to your vehicle!
** OK we all knew there would be a disclaimer, so here it is. Shown below are the scenarios where all of our efforts for maintaining a permanent “online” connection fall outside of any control we can bring to bear. Each of these relate to mobile network congestion on the cell tower that your GPS tracker is connected to. These congestion scenarios can be:
Busy times of the day
Overloaded cell towers due to poor infrastructure planning by the telcos in your area
Busy locations such as the Beach on a hot day, the MCG during the Grand Final, or a music festival at a Winery
And in general, any location where there are few cell towers but lots of people and phones around
In all of these scenarios, the cell tower may delay the ability for your GPS tracker to connect, or may immediately require it to disconnect from the server as soon as it has sent its latest GPS location to the server.
