The Fall and Rise of Location Based Services

Location based services (LBS) were one of the new emerging technologies that appeared and fell with the WAP non-revolution. The concept of providing information and facilities based on your physical location was simple and intuitive, but over hyped. During the early days of WAP capable mobile phones, BT Cellnet in conjunction with the then un-deregulated 192 service and Yellow Pages would allow you to find such useful things as a curry house when out on the town after a few too many pints. The idea was great and full of promise, but alas didn’t really work.

The public understandably were confused by the fact that if they were standing outside their favourite curry house and asked for the nearest, the service would often point them to one that was at best a few hundred yards away. The problem was that the service used the mobile network CellID to determine your location.

Each mobile service providers’ network is split up into areas called cells. Each cell is operated by one (or occasionally more) radio masts. When a mobile phone connects to the service provider’s network, it locates the strongest signal it can find and ‘logs in’ to that cell. Each cell has a unique id called the CellID. Each cell can only support a certain number of users within the area.

GSM specifies four different cell sizes. Umbrella cells cover an area also covered by smaller cells to provide coverage in any gaps and can range up to 35 kilometres. Macro cells cover country side and sub-urban areas from masts on high buildings and micro cells provide short range coverage for many users in urban and other dense usage regions. Pico cells are used in airports and major railway stations to provide single floor coverage for large numbers of users.

With 2G services these cells were on average quite large. Outside major cities (in particular London) a single cell could easily have a radius of a few kilometres. Early LBSs could not tell where within these cells you were standing. LBSs could only provide the location of the requested service that it had listed for that particular cell. For curry houses, it would list the same curry house no matter where within that cell you were, and heaven help you if you were logged into an umbrella cell.

The few survivors of the dot-com bust in 2001 have tailored themselves towards a business service rather than a consumer service. Most CellID based location services are used for asset and employee tracking, therefore performing paradigm-180. A business can employ a company to track the cell that a certain GSM receiver resides in to ensure it is in the correct location.

Whilst the early implementations of cell style location based services have died out, the idea itself has found new homes in a variety of areas.

The most well known of these areas is the search industry. Most ‘Yellow Pages’ style companies and big search engines allow you to search for shops and other service providers based off your geographic location. ‘Find the nearest’ has become a must-have feature for almost all search firms. Instead of using your current location based off a very fuzzy positioning system (like CellID), they use post (zip for our American readers) code to locate your position. This allows the service to be useful not just for your current location, but for where you plan to be in the future. It is useful to find the nearest curry house to the planned last pub on a pub crawl before you are there and too drunk to operate any kind of technology.

Satellite navigation firms are the latest to enter this area. Modern GPS-based navigation systems contain facilities to find the nearest fuel station, or other point of interest based on your current position and projected route. Garmin have recently launched hand held GPS based devices with optional data provided by Marco Polo travel guides to enable users to find recommended restaurants and museums during their journeys. Garmin have also begun to produce mobile phone based navigation and LBS products.

GPS provides a much finer resolution for LBS to use. Consumer devices with accuracy to within 100 metres in most situations, and to within 15 metres in ideal conditions, are now available on the mass market. Mid-range and high-end vehicles are sold with SatNav devices in the dashboard and more and more drivers are purchasing handheld and in-car systems. SatNav has moved out of the ‘early adopter’ bracket.

The mobile phone companies will not be outdone and find the market they visualised stolen from them. Unlike in the US, triangulation using multiple GSM transmitters has not been possible until recently (with dark rumours that this facility was reserved for the security services only). Cells are shrinking with the roll-out of 3G base stations, and it is possible to use signal strength from multiple transmitters to triangulate the position to within a few hundred meters, so better LBSs are possible.

Orange in the UK in early 2005 introduced a new service cunningly called ‘Cell-ID’ that utilised the new features of the mobile network to enable a handset to be located with a minimum accuracy of a couple of hundred metres. So far, however, this service has only been taken up by the dot-com business to business survivors.

So the market is coming full circle. With improved technology mobile based LBS should become both ubiquitous and more importantly actually useful.