E911 Featured Article

Location-Based Services Extending Beyond the E911 Space

By Tim Gray, TMCnet Web Editor

Earlier this year, the United States Federal Government passed legislation that mandated automatic location identification for cell phones in order to allow emergency responders to easier locate distressed callers. And while the legislation has received high marks for its scope, the process of implementing such a system across the county caused a stir among those responsible for managing municipal budgets.

 

However, the basics of such a service are already in place and these Location-based services (LBS) services have been working effectively for decades and in many cases are widely available to gather data about where a mobile device user is located.

 

In the 1970s E911 was developed and optimized to provide caller location information for police, fire and medical emergency services. In this sense, E911 service is the first location-based service.

 

And for nearly 25 years the system has functioned effectively for several reasons. For starters, the telephone endpoints did not move. These residential callers connected to telephone company central offices through wires that were routed through a circuit switch. This allowed emergency services units to pinpoint a caller’s location with relative ease through a unique telephone number assigned by the phone company.

 

Evolving technologies

 

As often happens, things changed with advancing technologies, and as the world discovered mobility in so many different ways – cell phones, PDAs, laptop computers, Voice over IP (VoIP) – the old system collected a little dust and was in need of an upgrade to ensure these calls were able to be traced.

 

Nicholas Maier, senior vice president at RedSky (News - Alert), says that while not invalidating original system design concepts, mobility has stretched and stressed existing E911 infrastructures.

 

“As telephony systems enable endpoints that can operate from anywhere, at anytime, it drives the requirement for real-time endpoint location determination (LD) systems that can support both emergency calling and other location-based services,” said Maier.

 

While cellular telephony continued to expand, the solutions that provided E911 support for these networks had to be developed, according to Bill Mertka, director of product management at RedSky. That is, in an effort to support 911 calling in an increasingly mobile world, new systems and methods that could deliver the location information of nomadic devices had to be developed.

 

These new methods routed 911 calls either based on the location of the cell sector (Wireless E911 Phase I) or on the actual handset location as determined by GPS or the network (Wireless E911 Phase II), said Mertka.

 

“In cellular, no location data is provisioned prior to the 911 call being made,” said Mertka. “Location has to be determined in real time when a 911 call is made. This is a drastic departure from the world of pre-provisioned location information in landline telephony. Wireless E911 was the first real use of mobile location information to provide a useful network service.”

 

LBS creating other market opportunities

 

Of course, as is the case with many technological advances, innovations spurs even more opportunities, and the same location technology that enables emergency calling from mobile phones has spawned market opportunities for other location-based services.

 

In fact, INSIGHT Research predicts that by 2013 LBS will drive a myriad of new services, with more than $1.6 billion in worldwide revenues expected this year already, driven by a growing number of services being developed that rely on location awareness. ABI Research (News - Alert) has predicted the worldwide LBS market will grow to more than $13 billion by 2013.

 

The increased activity in the LBS market is due to several factors but the growth of mobile capabilities – from mobile handset users to wireless broadband capable laptops, navigation units, and other devices – allowing both business users and consumers to remain connected wherever they are.

 

Location is obviously becoming more and more important, as a way to make mobile applications richer and more valuable. So much so that Google’s mobile applications that are location-enabled can double their usage and Android’s (News - Alert) SDK has location APIs for building location applications, according to the company.

 

And while the famed “Starbucks Scenario” – the coffee kingpin pings your cell as you near its store offering some type of promotion – has not become ubiquitous, there has been growth in this direction.

 

“Real-time location determination fuels these new and emerging location-based services and that’s RedSky’s core competency,” says Maier. “Packaging and delivering this capability to services providers will be a major component of our future growth.”

Tim Gray is a Web Editor for TMCnet, covering news in the IP communications, call center and customer relationship management industries. To read more of Tim�s articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Tim Gray

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