Out in LF Field

Imagine being able to tell your subscribers that they can use their wireless phones at personalized locations such as home, the mall and the gym for the same low rate as their wireline phones. If their cars break down in the middle of nowhere, and they don't know where the middle of nowhere is, they can use their phones to call AAA, which will view their location immediately on a screen and send out a tow truck for help. If they are business people who need to know where their traveling salespeople or repair people are, you can offer them a service enabling them to connect to the Internet to find out.

"It is an interesting opportunity for carriers," said David Hose, SignalSoft president.

And it is an opportunity made available with wireless location-finding (LF) technology, which can be used for a variety of applications beyond E-911.

"Like 911, whenever a phone is located, then that information in and by itself has marketability and can drive other applications," said Chuck Hinkle, KSI president.

Consumers definitely will be demanding those applications, according to The Strategis Group's Wireless Location Services: 1997 Market Study. The study projects that the location market has potential to exceed $8 billion per year by 2005. (See Figure 1 on page 36.) In fact, Steve Virostek, The Strategis Group director of messaging and dispatch, said that subscribers would be willing to pay an average of $13.20 per month for various location-based services.

These services are varied and many.

"Once you have the ability to locate something that is untethered, it is like opening the flood gates as far as the uses of the technology is concerned," said Ellen Kirk, SnapTrack vice president of marketing and strategic planning. "We spend a lot of time thinking about all of the ways to use location technology, and I know we are not even getting to the tip of the iceberg."

Safety Personal security on the roadway always has been a critical issue. Therefore, it comes as little surprise that Kirk anticipates roadside assistance as the first enhanced location service to be deployed -- and the service to be most frequently used. LF technology could be incorporated into many different rescue packages that offer quick-response services to people in need such as stranded motorists, crime victims, and the ill or injured. This would connect the subscriber to needed services and immediately provide the call center with the subscriber's location.

"In a fancy system, it may be that the person who answers the call will see not only where the call is being made from, but also what tow trucks are around that can help," SignalSoft's Hose said. "Maybe each of those tow trucks is on a map, and the person at the call center has the phone numbers of the tow trucks. The person could call the tow truck nearest to the location and tell them where to go."

In addition to roadside assistance, KSI's Hinkle envisions safety applications for college and university campuses. He said that since the adoption of the Federal Student Right-to-Know Act and the Campus Security Act of 1990, all colleges and universities that receive federal funds are required to publish and make readily available their data concerning on-campus crime rates. Since these numbers have been published, college public safety officials have seen an increase in questions concerning campus security. KSI foresees communications systems that could alert a central computer in the campus security office and display the location of an incident.

Such an application also could be used for retirement campuses. Currently, there are 22,000 residential facilities for the elderly. A significant number of these have their own grounds, which can average from as many as 8 square miles to continuing-care retirement centers averaging 34 acres. About 5% of the elderly population, or 1.7 million people, live in retirement communities, according to KSI. Hinkle said that LF technology could be beneficial in such communities that need to protect both the health and safety of their residents.

Tracking Vehicle and fleet management presents another opportunity area, according to TruePosition. In the average dispatch application, fleet managers have to call their employees out in the field to ask for their locations. When LF technology is used, however, fleet managers can use an electronic map to see where their vehicles are in the field, and then they can contact the vehicle that is closest to the location. (See Figure 2 on page 36.) It also allows fleet managers to respond to breakdowns, traffic delays or other unforeseen events quickly.

"If you know where all of your taxis or trucks are, then you can deploy them much more effectively, enabling efficient dispatch," Snap-Track's Kirk said. "You don't need to rely on them calling in and saying, 'OK, I'm close to that address."

This applies to emergency vehicles as well. Ira Brodsky, Datacomm Research president, said that most ambulances, police cars and fire trucks have 2-way radios, but few have locating technology. LF technology could enable them with new capabilities such as identifying the vehicle that is closest to a new emergency, he added. Ambulance companies, for example, could use LF technology to determine if their drivers were wasting a lot of time by making frequent wrong turns.

"You could create an audit trail of where they went," Brodsky said. "If somebody called an ambulance and complained that it took too long for the ambulance to arrive, you could show that the ambulance actually drove straight to the site, but that there was nothing it could do about the traffic."

In addition to tracking vehicles, LF technology could be used to track other objects as well. TruePosition said that transmitters could be added to assets such as expensive inventory in transit or time-sensitive shipments. Customer-service operators would be able to inform clients of the status of their shipments or vehicles in real time.

"The commercial value on asset tracking is enormous," Kirk said.

Kirk cited General Motors (GM) as an example, saying that when GM sends cars to its dealers, it takes from three to seven days for the cars to arrive. GM finances those cars until they hit the dealers' lots. Kirk said that there are some dealers who sign paperwork indicating that the cars arrived on Thursday, even though they actually arrived on Tuesday. "That is two extra days that GM is financing them," Kirk said. "This evidently costs GM hundreds of millions of dollars a year. If you can track assets accurately, companies will pay a fortune for this."

Another application, KSI's Hinkle said, is tracking wireless phones in order to detect fraud, which costs the industry $1 billion in lost revenue each year.

"People who are doing illegal acts such as narcotics, smuggling or automobile theft-related things use stolen or cloned phones, operating under the presumption that they cannot be located," hesaid.

But by coupling LF technology with fraud-detection software, the location system could pinpoint the location of illegal phone calls and automatically begin tracking a fraudulent user when a number is identified as being abused, according to True-Position. By allowing the criminal to continue while being observed instead of immediately deactivating the phone number in the switch, you would be able to build the evidence of fraud. As a result, arrest and conviction rates for fraudulent users would improve significantly.

Besides tracking objects, LF technology could be used to track people, such as children, patients or prisoners. The individual to be monitored would wear a portable device. Caretakers would be able to determine the location of their charges by placing a call to the portable device and receiving location information. In fact, Kirk said that probably the first commercial application of Snap-Track's location technology would be in Japan to track Alzheimer's patients.

Businesses also could use location technology to keep track of their employees.

"Think of a service where you give all your couriers that ride around on bikes cell phones," SignalSoft's Hose said. "Then the person that dispatches them has a connection through the Internet so that they can pull up the people they have on contract and see where the couriers are."

Billing Location-sensitive billing is probably the most talked about application, said Jim George, Cell-Loc vice president of marketing and technology. With location-sensitive billing, you could configure unique geographic boundaries, or rate zones, set up for each individual subscriber. This allows you to guarantee your subscribers the most competitive rates, wherever they may be.

"If a user is at home or very close to home and they are using their wireless phones, there will be almost zero cost to that because it is like using their landline home phones," George said. "But the farther you get away from your home, and you define your own districts, then you pay based on where you are relative to these zones."

For example, SignalSoft envisions offering baseball fans low-cost calls from the stadium for the entire season when they buy their phones by opening day. Or, you could offer low-cost minutes for soccer parents while they are at the school athletic field. Hose also suggested being able to give a teenager a wireless phone that works at school, at home and at the recreation center, but it does not work anywhere else unless he calls 911 or home.

"The whole idea here is that you use location and personalize it," Hose said. "Your special rate locations are just for you, and my special rate locations are just for me. This lets wireless companies compete with the wireline companies."

SnapTrack's Kirk said that location-sensitive billing could lead to wireline replacement.

"Wireless is about 3% or 6% of the total telephone minutes," she said. "If you can get your subscribers to start using their portable phones all the time, which location-sensitive billing will allow you to do, that gives you access to that other 94%."

Information "Combining location with information presents a lot of interesting applications," Hose said.

One such application is traffic information. KSI said that according to the U.S. Department of Transportation, more than $100 billion in productivity is lost each year due to traffic congestion and accidents causing injury or death. An LF system could enable traffic-management centers to locate vehicles in traffic in order to monitor traffic conditions, communicate with vehicles and manage traffic.

This would come in handy for emergency vehicles, Brodsky said. "There could be a solution where the network makes the lights for the next three or four intersections green so that the ambulance has a clear path all the way to the emergency site," he said.

Concierge directory assistance is another information application.

"(Location technology) will enable mobile yellow pages in a way that has never been enabled before," Kirk said. For example, a subscribercould call to ask, "Where is the closest Mexican restaurant?" A subscriber on the road could call for a list of all the hotels in the area that have rooms available. Likewise, a subscriber could call to find out where the nearest ATM is that doesn't require paying a fee or call to find out destination directions based on his current location.

"This is the whole idea of retrieving information but having it personalized to you and personalized to your location," Hose said.

Opportunity is Knocking In addition to creating new revenue opportunities and satisfying customers' needs, deploying a location system is an opportunity for service differentiation. Snap-Track's Kirk said that value-added services based on location do not compare to other existing services. For example, there might be marginal utility to have voice mail on your wireless phone, but if you have voice mail at the office and at home, do you need another voice mail? Probably not, she said.

"However, if I want the safety of knowing that whenever I call AAA, they are going to be able to find me, there is no substitute for that," Kirk added. "It doesn't duplicate anything that is possible otherwise. The location services are so fundamental that they will have a huge impact on the wireless user market."

Hinkle said that he's seeing a "tremendous push" toward differentiation as well as a slowing of the price wars. "When the price wars diminish, I believe features will be one of the main thrusts or reasons why people prefer one capability or service over another," he said. "So I think this is going to drive a lot of the location applications."

Hose agreed. "Carriers have so many subscribers, and they are trying to find a way to make the subscribers stay with them instead of going over to another carrier," he said. "One way to do this is personalize the service. What's more personal than where you are right now?"