Sprint turning up GPS

As Sprint is simultaneously seeking an extension to meet Enhanced-911 compliance, the carrier is pushing its new GPS services, and according to Sprint officials it plans to enable commercial location-based data services on all of its current line of new CDMA and iDEN handsets.

In the last few months, the operator has been turning up new location-based services (LBS) across both Sprint and Nextel networks, and today it announced its latest offering, Mapquest GPS services for Nextel BlackBerry devices. Last Thursday, however, Sprint asked the FCC to for another two years to meet its requirements for E-911 compliance, which would require 95% of all of its handsets in service to have Global Positioning System receivers capable of linking back to the public-safety network.

According to Reuters, Sprint petitioned the FCC to grant it an additional two years beyond the Dec. 31 deadline. Sprint officials said it would reach 80% compliance by that date owing to still-lagging replacement cycles and software difficulties. While the Sprint CDMA network is on track to meet the 95% goal, the Nextel imbedded base will be at only 67% compliance by the end of the year, a Sprint spokeswoman said.

Unlike other carriers, which have chosen to tackle E-911 through cellsite triangulation, Sprint has linked compliance to GPS, which provides much more accurate location readings than network-based solutions. Sprint has also concurrently tried to tie that GPS technology into a commercial LBS services, and over the last few months has inked deals with navigation services Garamond and TeleNAV and has been expanding its Nextel deal with Mapquest.

“E-911 is extremely important,” said Sprint director of location based services Mary Foltz, who ran Nextel’s LBS unit before the merger. “Now we also have an opportunity to offer other commercial services using that technology. It’s an opportunity to help recover that investment into E-911.”

Every new handset Nextel has shopped since November 2002 has been GPS enabled, and all new handsets shipped by Sprint today also have GPS radios, Foltz said. From a service perspective, however, GPS does not mean automatic access to location-based services. In order to meet FCC guidelines, Sprint and Nextel began including GPS in every new handset ordered, helped by the fact that vendors like Qualcomm integrated GPS into every CDMA chipset shipped after 2002. But in many of those handsets only basic E-911 features can be accessed--encoding GPS location data in a voice signal to a dispatcher. Many of those phones were not Java-enabled or had large enough screens to support LBS applications, Foltz said.

But Sprint is reversing that trend, Foltz said. Every new handset the company is shipping has both at least basic Java and expanded graphic capabilities, and as Sprint works out software issues for each handset it is quickly turning on LBS services for its devices. While Sprint currently has location-based services powered by the cell site location, Sprint plans to launch enterprise class GPS services later this year as well as expand its existing content partnerships to many more devices, eventually creating a cross-network unified platform, Foltz said.

In the last year numerous carriers around the world have launched GPS-powered LBS services, including heavyweights like Verizon Wireless and NTT DoCoMo. But many of the first moves in the market have been made by CDMA carriers, primarily due to the ready availability of GPS on Qualcomm’s chipsets. Qualcomm CDMA Technologies senior director of product management Rob Rovetta said Qualcomm decided in 2000 to include GPS as a basic component on every QCT integrated circuit, not only to meet E-911 compliance, but also to give carriers an easy avenue into LBS. With all newer CDMA handsets automatically GPS-enabled, carriers don’t have to wait out new handset replacement cycles to launch far-spanning services, he said.

Rovetta said Qualcomm is taking the same approach with its wideband CDMA line. As LBS becomes more popular, integrated GPS will become more critical to carriers and Qualcomm is still the only UMTS vendor to have integrated GPS on every chip shipped, he said.