Mike, I've been telling people in the security industry about using Globalstar for mobile security applications ever since I put my first few thousand nickels into G* about two years ago.
My friends tell me LoJack works fine within its design specifications, but a) you have to know the car has been stolen, otherwise nobody will be looking for it, b) you have to have a pretty good idea where the thief took it, because of the limited range of the receiver the police use, and c) that somewhere has to be within the jurisdiction of a police department that has LoJack capability.
A better system, in my humble opinion, would be based on the same kind of system we now use for monitoring home and business security systems. An in-vehicle system determines is triggered, so it dials a monitoring facility and transmits its location (GPS) and the nature of the problem. (This does not have to be a security problem, by the way. You might have just run out of gas.) The monitoring service, which will have access to a database of all the local dispatch services (and there are a lot of them) will dispatch the appropriate police to wherever the vehicle happens to be at the time.
By the way, our company's basic monitoring charge starts at $24.00/month, paid annually. We have our own central station monitoring station, but most of our competitors subcontract that (or sell the contract outright) to some huge monitoring companies. Their wholesale cost is $5-6/month, which is marked up to around $30/month. So, there is considerable margin there to work with. |
