Why PON Codes?
PON Codes were designed by GPS Ireland Consultants Ltd to allow road users in Ireland get better and more efficient use of their SatNav's, particularly those in the logistics and service industries. PON codes help to resolve the ambiguity of Ireland's property addressing system which causes confusion even for the locals. They can also be used by Postal Services and any service which involves navigating to a particular place at any time of the day or night.

What Are PON Codes?
PON Codes are Position orientated Navigation Codes or PONC (pronounced "Punk") , for short;- meaning a dot or point in the Irish Language. A PON Code is a 7 Character Alphanumeric Code which defines geographic position to within +/- 6 meters of the equivalent Latitude & Longitude or Irish Grid coordinates for the same location.

PON Codes are easier to remember and work with than Lat & Long or Grid and, therefore, can be widely used and accepted as a Postal Code type System.

The structure of the PON Code or PONC is very simple to understand. The PON Code for GPS Ireland's Offices is W5K 59VN which can be broken down as follows:

The "W" defines a 100km square which covers most of Cork. The First Character will always be a letter.

The Second two characters of the code "5K" can be either letters or numbers and together with the first letter, "W5K" they define a 3.5 km Square within area of "W".

The following two characters "59" will always be numbers and they are the smallest units of the code defining down to meter level values.

Finally the last two Characters, "VN" , combined with the first 3, define a 120 meter square area.

The breakdown of the code and exact PON Codes with related Local and Area squares can be seen and further explored in detail here>

PON Codes can immediately be used in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland and could be extended later to other parts of the world if required.

The Justification For PON Codes
The need for a Post Code system in Ireland is widely accepted. The need for such a code to satisfy the requirements of vehicle logistics and navigation has been long argued by GPS Ireland and the logistics community in Ireland. The adoption of the UK Post Codes by SatNav manufactures has resulted in a significant increase in their use by logistics companies and emergency services with an associated decrease in delivery and response times. It is clear, therefore, that Post Codes are needed in Ireland for all the traditional mail delivery reasons but they also have to support logistics and vehicle navigation requirements. In Ireland, as we are starting with a clean sheet in this area, and with PON Codes all possible requirements are satisfied, taking full advantage of modern technologies such as GIS, GPS & SatNav.

There are currently more that 0.5 million GPS users in Ireland, 60% of which are SatNav users. It is conservatively predicated that there will be more than 1 million SatNav users in Ireland by the end of 2010.

SatNav users already share positional information widely for the following:

• Tourist attractions
  
• Hotels/Restaurants & Accommodation
  
• Sports events
  
• Petrol Stations
  
• Personal addresses
  
• Business/Customer Locations
  
  and these are widely distributed on e-mail, by phone, over the internet, in written reports and by voice.

The easiest way to define location is by means of coordinates which SatNav manufacturers already inherently support. However, geographic coordinates in their natural form are cumbersome to handle, are easily misunderstood or misinterpreted, they have too many characters and are not easily memorised.

Therefore, whilst geographic coordinates are desirable, they have to be modified to make them user friendly. PON Codes are a user friendly and easily memorised version of traditional coordinates.

Who Can Use PON Codes?

• Courier Services and Dispatch Riders
  
• Food & Flower Delivery Services
  
• Mail/Document Collection & Delivery Services
  
• Construction Vehicles
  
• Car Hire Companies
  
• Shop Delivery Services
  
• Mail Order and Web Retail Services
  
• Home Furnishing & White Good Delivery Services
  
• Service Companies
  
• Street Furniture & Road Sign Maintenance Companies
  
• Mobile Sales Forces
  
• Hackney, Taxi & Transport Companies
  
• Emergency Services;- Fire, Ambulance, Doctor, Police
  
• Civil Defence, Order Of Malta, St John's Ambulance etc
  
• Utility maintenance field crews
  
• Buy & Sell Services
  
• Private Drivers; - commuting or finding weddings, functions and funerals.
  
• Tourists and Tourist services
  
• The Hospitality Industry; Hotels, Guest Houses, Attractions
  
• Banks, ATM's Pharmacies, Petrol Stations, Community services
  
• Billboard Advertising Companies
  
• Mobile Medical & Screening Services
  
• Farm Owners/managers
  
• Boat Owners/Marina Managers
  

The list is endless - Tell us of your uses

Getting a PON Code
The unique feature about PON codes is that, unlike traditional Post Code systems, they do not have to be allocated to you by someone on high, you create your own and not just for properties but for any location. And you can recalculate so that if the delivery truck arriving is too big for your normal entrance you can give the driver the PON code of a different entrance. This allows total flexibility for the requirements of modern life; - no waiting to get one and no waiting to change it.

This website allows you to create a code in two distinct ways:

• Using a Latitude and Longitude of a Location - this method is recommended as the most accurate way using a GPS or SatNav to record position. Commercial, Tourist or Service related facilities and, anyone who is unsure of the exact location, should use this option where possible.
  
• Using the Address and a Web Map Interface - many persons whose property is in urban areas will be able to use this option easily, using their address to search a map and then moving an icon to where the property is on the map. If there is any doubt, the Lat/Long option should be used.

It is not vital that users Code the exact locations of their properties/services/events etc as in many cases drivers will be happy to be guided to within 50 meters of the final destination. However, users are encouraged to be as accurate as possible and if necessary to come back and recalculate at any time and to use the Lat/Long option. Our database will identify properties with different PON Codes and this will not present a problem. Don't forget that as the PON Code is sensitive to 6 meter changes in area clicked or location saved on a GPS, it is possible to get a slightly different PONC for the same location and this also is not a problem.

A National Post Code
At the moment Ireland does not have a National Post Code System. A plan to introduce one by 1st January 2008 did not happen. It is understood that recommendations on the proposals of consultants submitted to Government in 2006 will be re-presented to Government during 2008. If the political will and finances permit, a National System may come to pass by early 2010. An Post has repeatedly stated that it does not need a Post Code system as it operates its own internal one. However, new postal services entering the market as a result of deregulation in early 2010 will need a system so that they can compete with An Post on a level playing field.

In the meantime, PON Codes will satisfy the requirements of a significant section of the population and could be considered for the role of National System when the time comes.

The National Statistic Board in its document "The Statistical and Policy Value of Post Codes" states that is most desirable to implement a Post Code system which is based on geographic coordinates as follows: "Significant value is added to data when it can be spatially mapped. A point-based postcode system that uses grid reference/GPS technology would provide a relatively clear-cut approach to allocating a postcode to an address.... a geo-coordinates approach would permit an early introduction of postcodes at a relatively low cost. It would also avoid the very difficult task of trying to group households together into small area clusters that are meaningful both to policy-makers and for postal delivery"

Unlike the coordinate based Post Code system as designed by GPS Ireland in the PON Code system, the traditional Post Code system such as that used in the UK and Northern Ireland has the following limitations:

• They are expensive and resource hungry to implement from scratch i.e. the time, manpower, survey, administrative, technological and financial resources required to map and allocate Codes
  
• As they are also dependent on a lookup database, deployment on mobile systems such as SatNav's PDA's and mobile phones have the following associated issues:
  
  • Additional memory and processing power is required to handle the database.
    
  • The use of a database on each mobile device must be individually licensed per area covered
    
  • Keeping a deployed database up to date is cumbersome and problematic with an ongoing update costs for the user.
    
  • Non mapping based GPS receivers with limited memory, yet widely used by emergency services, would not be able to use this type of Post Code System;- e.g. Basic Handheld GPS systems widely used by Civil Defence and Red Cross personnel cannot currently handle the UK type Post Code system but could easily implement the GPS Ireland PON Code type system.
    
  • Traditional Post Code systems, because they are related to road and street databases, cannot Post Code streets or roads with no names of which we have many in Ireland.
    

Traditional Post Code systems, because they are related to road and street databases, are slow to keep up to date with new housing estates and road construction.
The following is a quote from a former British Telecom employee on the matter of Post Codes in the UK: I worked for British Telecom for a while and their problem was that a lot of their addresses were new sites where a postcode had not been allocated. The system was good, except for the need to have a geographic converter to convert postcodes into easting and northing co-ordinates, and the inability to cope with new structures.

Traditional Post Code systems, because they are related to road and street databases, do not readily support the Post Coding of non structures which nowadays are an important aspect of both commercial and social life. Traditional Post Code systems allocate codes and do this by relating mapped structures to roads. Therefore, if a structure is not mapped a code cannot be allocated. Examples of non normal or non structures which require Post Codes in modern Ireland are:

• Grain or fertiliser silos for farming are not normally mapped and therefore are unlikely to be allocated postcodes under traditional systems. In Ireland, deliveries frequently have to be made to such structures when the owner is not on site leading to the possibility of expensive mistakes. The PON Code system would allow the owner to allocate his own code himself and a delivery truck could navigate to it without the need for a related database.
  
• Sporting Events - GAA, Point to Point, Road Bowls etc.
  
• Open Air Entertainment Events such as the Barbra Streisand Concert outside Leixlip in 2007 which needed road approaches to be coded to assist in traffic management. The absence of such coding which could have been provided by PON Codes lead to a traffic hold up which cost the organisers large sums of money in refunds, resulted in substantial traffic jams and could have resulted in the loss of life if an accident had occurred on site.
  
• Accident & Disaster sites - Codes are needed to quickly disseminate an accident location and recommended approaches for emergency vehicles and crews. Traditional Post Codes cannot support this function but GPS Ireland PON Codes can and as a 7 character alphanumeric code, they can be communicated clearly and quickly over voice communication systems making them also suitable for Gardai, Army and Civil Defence who traditionally would have used 12 character Grid Codes which take longer to communicate.
  
• Mobile services such as Health Clinics, Blood Donor Clinics, Libraries, Mobile Banking Services, Clean Water Distribution Trucks (now a regular feature of Irish urban and rural life) etc
  
• Construction Site Infrastructure Construction site offices, delivery locations, emergency muster sites, vehicle exits and entrances etc
  
• Health & Safety Infrastructure muster and safety resource locations for major industrial sites which can be declared in County Emergency plans.

PON Codes can support all of these and much more - if you have any other ideas let us know at info@irishpostcodes.ie