Compromising Position

No one wants to talk about profiting from what happened on Sept. 11, 2001. But that doesn't mean that someone won't benefit from it.

Along with companies specializing in security and disaster recovery, the list of telecom sectors that may realize a new financial boost in the aftermath of 9/11 includes E-911 location technology firms.

Traditionally, the types of customers who have bought wireless service for personal safety reasons have not been much loved by carriers. They didn't bill too many minutes, and they were never very responsive to special promotions and new services. Likewise, the FCC's mandate for carriers to implement E-911 location technology in their networks by a certain (but ever-changing) date, with its associated costs and testing, didn't do much to stoke their passion for the subject.

But industry apathy about E-911 and personal safety as an application has melted away as a result of the 9/11 tragedy.

“Personal safety is now the killer app, though for all the worst reasons,” said Chris Wade, CEO of U.K. technology developer Cambridge Positioning Systems. CPS makes E-911 software technology that stands to profit if carriers' E-911 implementation accelerates.

“Without any question, the move toward mandate compliance has become more aggressive since Sept. 11,” Wade said. “Carrier now realize they need to have it in their budgets, and for end users, the whole issue of privacy concerns appears to have gone away.”

Wade readily admits that this new commitment to E-911 deployment has arrived a bit late. “It should really happen this year, though I've said that two other times in my life.”

Though many industry watchers might attribute the delays in E-911 adoption to carrier apathy, Rob Rowe, chief technology officer at CPS, said that is not necessarily the case.

“There is not a single entity to blame for the delay. We were just a bit optimistic as an industry that there wouldn't be any difficulty in doing this,” said Rowe. “There is a lot of testing involved, and the technologies are entirely new, so there is always room to improve performance. It is not a trivial thing.”

Rowe has worked on the E-911 issue since he was chief of engineering at start-up wireless carrier Aerial Communications and later at VoiceStream Communications after that company acquired Aerial. He said VoiceStream actually has been pivotal in helping keep the industry's E-911 efforts on track, and it also was influential in helping CPS perfect its location solution.

VoiceStream already is field-testing Motorola and Nokia handsets equipped with CPS' Cursor Enhanced Observed Time Difference (E-OTD) technology, and it hopes to have E-OTD handsets commercially available by Sept. 1, according to an FCC document filed by the carrier last month.

“The people at VoiceStream gave us access to their network two-and-a-half years ago to use as a testbed, and they were very helpful in discussing the results of our tests with us,” said Wade.

The vendor's Cursor E-OTD technology, unlike other location technologies — such as satellite-based global positioning system or proprietary location solutions developed by TruePosition, Grayson Wireless and Intrado — is completely software-based and requires no change to handset hardware. The software takes about two or three months to integrate into a handset vendor's manufacturing process.

Also, while GPS and other solutions all count on chipsets within handsets to create signal noise that helps the network find them, Cursor E-OTD software allows handsets to “listen to the network and take measurements that help determine the exact location of the handset,” said Rowe.

Cursor is so far only compliant with GSM phones, and its network-listening capability is, in fact, directly related to how GSM establishes communication with the network to constantly measure signal strength.

These advantages may help CPS make an impact in the market, but the company also must contend with the fact that GPS satellite technology is considered a de facto standard for location applications such as vehicle tracking. Wade said he is not worried about GPS's lead on CPS and its effort to tap the location market because there will be a need for different types of location systems.

“Our technology isn't being targeted at vehicle tracking. GPS works well in rural environments and ours doesn't, but ours works well in dense, urban environments where GPS doesn't,” said Wade.

Yet as the immediate societal effects of the Sept. 11 attacks begin to fade, the potential of a company like CPS to succeed will depend on its ability to move the location services market beyond the realm of personal safety and into more lucrative and commercial applications.

Those applications include travel information services, such as local traffic updates, and so-called “buddy finder” apps that use short messaging service to tell a wireless customer when their friends are nearby. The buddy finder category is one of the applications being positioned by many carriers as a key to unlocking the enigmatic but potentially lucrative youth market.

So far, those kinds of applications are more talk than reality, and industry watchers continue to debate their future impact. But Wade believes their development could also be spurred by the ability of vendors to embed their location technologies in an array of devices beyond the mobile phone, such as the BlackBerry and Palm-like devices.

“We have a project to integrate with the BlackBerry that is going on right now,” said Wade.

With financial backing from Siemens, Infineon, Intel, Ericsson and other heavyweights, CPS may be able to hang on while the location technology market develops.

Still, Wade readily admits that the persistent E-911 deployment delays may continue to take their toll on vendor health. “The FCC mandate for E-911 implementation helped create an environment of about 10 to 12 location technology companies,” said Wade. “In the end, there will be only two or three left,” said Wade.