Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Phone Homing

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Date: Sun, 10 Nov 2002 05:32:47 -0500

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Phone Homing

Rhode Island breaks ground with cellular phone global positioning systems

By Knight Ridder Newspapers

Published on 11/03/2002

New York -- In Rhode Island, battered women, stranded sailors, lost hikers and others in need of emergency help can dial 911 from a Sprint, Verizon or T-Mobile cell phone and authorities automatically know where they are, thanks to global positioning system technology embedded in their phones.
The only statewide e911 system in the country still has kinks to work out, but officials expect Cingular, AT&T and Nextel phones to be connected by the end of the year. It's one of many developments that experts and analysts are studying closely as location tracking becomes the latest business opportunity and battleground for privacy advocates.
The idea that your boss, parent or spouse can track your whereabouts accurately in real time is not some far-fetched vision of Big Brother. As the technology that makes this possible gets cheaper and smaller every day, many devices are already on the market.
“The big difference in the last year or so is that the technology has finally got small enough and cheap enough and more importantly, low-power enough that you can start to track a whole slew of different things,” said Roger Hayward, chief technology officer of Axiom Navigation, a Costa Mesa, Calif., company that makes wireless GPS devices that track vehicles, packages and people.
“We have customers using almost throw-away devices that would be embedded in cardboard shipping boxes and we're selling devices to police departments that are putting them into a variety of police vehicles.” Axiom also sells $120 GPS enabled battery pack attached to a cell phone that allows police officers to be tracked when they're out of the vehicle.
In Palm Beach, Fla., a company called Digital Angel expects to launch a product in November that uses biosensor, GPS and wireless technology to locate missing people, monitor patients and track their temperature, pulse and other medical conditions. The company also is targeting owners who want to find stolen pets or property and farmers who need to manage livestock.
And in the San Francisco Bay Area, bicyclists and runners have found new uses for the small handheld GPS devices more often used by boaters and hikers. Menlo Park, Calif., software engineer Tim Pfafman straps a small GPS to his bike to monitor his speed and elevation, then downloads the information to the Web to track his progress over time. Pfafman helped create a company to do this, Softbug.com, which has been merged with Axiom Navigation.
Location tracking is not new. Trucking companies, the Coast Guard and the Navy have used Loran-C technology to pinpoint cargo or the location of vessels at sea. Lost pets can be returned to their owners thanks to implanted chips that respond to a scanning device. But the size and accuracy of GPS technology is widening the field of business opportunities, from concierge services in your car to cell phones that can find friends in the area to new ways of tracking your private ambulance fleet or your construction crew.
“Some of the cool things that are going on are within the medical realm. There's a need for monitoring and tracking the elderly. I see more applications coming up in fleet management. People are also talking about detention centers — if you're on probation and your truant officer is trying to locate you, basically they can find you,” said Ken Nagai, marketing manager for Motorola's Radio Products Division. “It's basically Big Brother is looking down on you.”
Imagine being able to find a lost spouse at the shopping mall, track down the jerk who stole your laptop or automatically locate the nearest burrito joint when you're in the neighborhood. The potential advantages as well as the intrusions on privacy have already caught the attention of the Federal Trade Commission, which began bringing together privacy experts, advertisers, analysts and e-commerce businesses two years ago. Guidelines adopted by the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association ask companies to inform consumers clearly about the collection of location information and not use the information unless they have permission.
But those guidelines don't always apply. A Merced, Calif., man already has been reported to authorities by his car. Scott Eugene Knight, a former Army recruiter, was convicted for his role in a hit and run collision last year. Knight was in a new Chevrolet Tahoe when he hit and killed a pedestrian but kept going. The car's air bags deployed and its OnStar GPS tracking system automatically gave the highway patrol the location of the crash.
And yet, a growing number of people are willing to pay for location tracking services in their cars, primarily for emergencies, navigation and theft prevention, according to a Jupiter Research survey of 1,961 online consumers in February.
The 2.4 million subscribers in the “telematics” market are growing at about 170,000 a month. Assuming an initial $400 installation fee, 44 percent of people surveyed were willing to pay for basic services such as automatic collision notification and stolen-vehicle tracking. Half said they would pay for basic and premium services such as help with navigation, business finders and e-mail. And 32 percent were willing to pay for basic, premium and luxury services such as concierge services and live help with restaurant reservations, said Jupiter automotive analyst Julie Ask.
In Europe, location tracking in cell phones is more widespread and emergency guidelines are more relaxed. Legislators in England have considered forcing cellular carriers to use location-tracking devices in order to prevent cell phone theft. Carriers are more focused on coming up with commercial applications using a network-based technology known as Enhanced Observed Time Difference, in which signals sent to a cell phone from three different places produce a triangulation effect that helps pinpoint a location.
But in the United States, companies are still struggling to find the right balance between GPS technology and network-based technology. GPS technology is more accurate, but also more expensive and doesn't always work in dense urban areas. Network-based technology is cheaper, but is less accurate and doesn't always work in rural areas where there are fewer cell towers.
Cingular and AT&T Wireless have recently concluded that EOTD technology doesn't meet federal requirements for accuracy, and both carriers are likely to face fines for being behind schedule, said Ken Hyers, an analyst with Cahners In-Stat Group.
On the other hand, AT&T Wireless is the first to use location technology for commercial services. It's launched a mobile buddy list service called Find Friends. Users can see who among their friends or coworkers are nearby, call or send text messages to meet up, then get directions to a nearby restaurant, bookstore or bar. Verizon and Sprint are currently focusing on making sure their 911 networks operate properly — all carriers are under a federal mandate to be able to connect 911 systems with the vast majority of cell phone users by 2005.
“Nextel says they're pretty far along on both emergency uses and plans for commercial services and they're primarily a businessperson's carrier,” Hyers said. “You're going to see things like how do I find directions to my client sites, how do I track employees, let's find all the members of a work crew, say a construction crew.” Nextel phones, which operate like walkie-talkies and are often paid for by a company, may also help companies get around sticky privacy issues, Hyers added.
But carriers say they have their own incentive not to annoy existing customers. “At the end of the day, if ma and pa coffee shop sends out coupons and people inadvertently sign up and every time they walk by, the coupon comes up on the screen and they get annoyed, they're not going to blame the coffee shop,” said Verizon spokesman Jeffrey Nelson. “They're going to blame us. We're the one who has the relationship and I can assure you we're going to protect that relationship.”
Whether GPS-based location tracking will take off faster among cell phone consumers, motorists or in businesses is not clear. Telecommunications analyst Andrew Seybold at Outlook 4Mobility is watching the action in all three arenas. GPS devices such as Wherify.com's wristwatch, designed to help nervous parents keep tabs on their children, “scare me to death,” Seybold said. “It could give people a false sense of security. The bottom line is that these things work, but not all the time.”
While emergency 911 networks are not yet ready except for in Rhode Island and a handful of other counties, the benefits are clear. In Rhode Island, battered women have picked up a cell phone to call police only to have it knocked from their hands, said Raymond LaBelle, the executive director of the state's e911 system.
“If you're the victim of a car-jacking, you could call from the trunk and police would know your whereabouts,” LaBelle said. Not long ago, before the system was in place, an elderly woman came home, got out of her car and collapsed on the back stairs leading up to her house. “She called us but she was totally incoherent. You listen to that for 10 minutes, it'll tear your heart out. We found out later she had expired. You hear things like that and you realize the importance of this.”

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