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Open Source Web Mapping Pilot – AT&T Wireless

Our Client

AT&T Wireless (now Cingular Wireless)
Bothell, Washington
Fall, 2004

Project Background

AT&T Wireless had built an internal mapping application to drive a retail store locator and wireless coverage map. Using a proprietary software stack (MapInfo MapXtreme on Oracle Spatial) the application was deployed internally to a small group of clients (the inside sales team).

Despite minor complaints about speed, the original application served the internal clients adequately enough. However, when the time came to roll the services out to the public web site, AT&T had a major problem – there was no way to scale-up the application to service the loads that the public site would generate.

The current site was already running noticeably slowly with just a few hundred users, on expensive Sun hardware. Substantially more hardware would be required to support the public site.
The licensing cost of the MapXtreme/Oracle Spatial combination would dwarf the hardware cost as the amount of servers was scaled up. Total costs just to support such a mapping application would be into seven figures

AT&T needed a new solution that could scale to handle the higher load, without breaking the bank.

Refractions' Solution

AT&T Wireless contracted Refractions to build a proof-of-concept alternative using an open source software stack – UMN Mapserver on PostGIS/PostgreSQL.

The goal was to show that an open source solution could perform exactly the same tasks as the existing software stack – to replicate the existing application with a different backend.

AT&T had short deadlines, and Refractions worked with their team to implement a complete system within their timeframe. Refractions installed the software, prepared road network data and loaded it into the database, created sophisticated map styles to and cartography, and wrote a new geocoding module for PostGIS to handle address look-ups.

The entire proof-of-concept, from an initial meeting to a fully operational system, was delivered in under two months.

The Result

Immediately, AT&T's new open source application ran several times faster than their original system, even though it was deployed on commodity Intel hardware.

Additionally, because there was no software license cost AT&T had the option of scaling their application for only the cost of hardware. Finally, because the new application ran faster, on commodity hardware, the hardware scaling cost was reduced as well.