Wifi Revolution

Skyhook Wireless, a provider of the WiFi (News - Alert) Positioning and the XPS Hybrid Location systems, and Symbian, a provider of open operating systems for mobile phones, reportedly have demonstrated WiFi positioning on the latest version of Symbian (News - Alert) OS, v9.5.

 

Both companies demonstrated support for Skyhook’s WiFi Positioning System with Symbian’s LBS architecture, enabling fast and accurate location acquisition in urban and indoor environments.

 

The officials say that in recent months there has been an increased adoption of cell phone-based vehicle navigation – as shown by the chart below, which shows the total number of location-based applications for Apple’s iPhone (News - Alert), through this month – as well as new and interesting location-based services, such as pedestrian navigation and geo-tagging of photos.

 

The new applications require location technology that can work everywhere, Skyhook says.

Patrick Connolly, research director at IMS Research, said that rural areas and highways are not the most lucrative markets for location-based services, so handsets that combine Skyhook’s WiFi location with other location technologies to ensure functionality in metro areas and indoors will generate more revenue.

 

The officials also say that companies who want location-based services to continue its accelerated growth trajectory, must deploy location sensing technology that is “consumer grade,” and can quickly and accurately provide location information in the places where these applications are used.

 

Although existing mobile location technologies, such as A-GPS and cellular triangulation, are an important part of the solution, they have accuracy and availability issues indoors and in urban environments. By integrating with Symbian’s LBS architecture, the WiFi Positioning System can easily address these issues and optimize location accuracy, coverage, and time to fix across all environments.

 

Mike Whittingham, the vice president of ecosystem development at Symbian, said that Skyhook’s WiFi Positioning System illustrates the diverse location acquisition support of their LBS architecture. He expects the solution to enable the future revenue opportunities of location-based services.

 

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