RB board is getting awfully busy.
ragingbull.com
Nice to see enthusiasm building
AGT and PRAV look like a nice duo
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E-911 mandate...could be a new $8 billion-a-year revenue stream.
wirelessreview.com
E-911: Mandate or Opportunity?
The E-911 mandate will cost wireless billions. But it?s also priming the pump for what could be a new, $8 billion-a-year revenue stream.
By Tim Kridel, Staff Writer
There?s good news and bad news about E-911 Phase II. The bad news is that it has the potential to be ruinously expensive for carriers: upward of $20,000 per base station for a network-based solution, according to preliminary vendor estimates. The good news is that there is also the potential to recoup those investments and then some through value-added services. Not bad, considering E-911 was born out of public policy and not marketing strategy.
But before carriers can choose from the dozens of solutions currently in testing, they first have to create a business plan for E-911. Those plans ultimately will determine what solutions vendors provide because the first rule of real estate also applies to E-911: You pay for location. A solution could meet the FCC?s Phase II accuracy requirement of 125 feet 67% of the time (125/67) but still not be precise enough for the value-added services necessary to defray implementation costs.
?Our target is not the FCC (requirement). Our target is value-added services,? said Barry Matsumori, vice president of operations at E-911 vendor U.S. Wireless. ?We look at it as, yes, we?ll meet it, but we have to well exceed it.?
Exceeding it could be costly, but most see it as a worthwhile investment if the return is as good as some predict: as much as $8 billion annually for services such as vehicle tracking and roadside assistance, according to 1997 Strategis Group estimates.
?The carriers need to look at the mandate as an opportunity,? said Steve Millstein, a former Southwestern Bell Mobile Systems vice president of marketing who is now executive vice president of location-technology vendor Protection One. ?It?s an opportunity to make money.?
Three Years & a Lot of Questions
But before carriers can make money, they?ll have to spend money. How much depends on how they answer some specific questions:
? A handset- or network-based solution? Publicly, carriers are mum about whether they favor handset- or network-based solutions. Privately, however, many have told vendors they prefer network-based solutions because they give more long-term control and flexibility. Adding value-added services means upgrading dozens of base stations rather than hundreds of thousands of handsets, which most carriers subsidize. There?s also the embedded-base problem. Carriers have to be able to locate all callers, not just the ones with E-911 handsets. Value-added services wouldn?t be a significant revenue generator or differentiator if they can?t be offered to the entire customer base.
? What kinds of markets are served? As every carrier knows, signal coverage and quality varies significantly from the wide-open plains to the urban jungle, and the accuracy of each solution also could vary according to environment.
? What business plan will support E-911? What value-added services can take advantage of location finding, and how much are consumers willing to pay for those services?
? Does the vendor provide just the hardware and software, or will it work with third-party vendors to provide a turnkey solution that includes value-added services? Many carriers have made it clear they want turnkey packages.
?They look to us to bring that to the table,? said Jim George, Cell-Loc vice president of marketing and technology.
? Is the solution built around an open standard? The wider the pool of third-party hardware and software providers, the more choices in the key areas of middleware and value-added services. Some vendors, such as SCC Communications, are positioning themselves as providers of middleware, which will compile the raw spatial information, correlate it with databases and translate it into usable information such as a street address.
? How is the solution priced? One way to get definable front-end costs is to buy all of the hardware and software and manage E-911 in-house. Another option is to outsource portions by paying a third party on a per-transaction basis. But incremental costs are variable and thus difficult to incorporate into a business plan. If the value-added service suddenly becomes wildly popular, costs also will rise. A possible middle ground is paying a set fee to the third party based on the size of the market, as is done with many billing systems.
? Can 125/67 be achieved with existing infrastructure? A network that already includes microcells and picocells covering areas 125 meters or less would be compliant in those parts of the service area.
? Is the system flexible and scaleable? It?s one thing to accommodate additional subscribers; it?s another to accommodate additional FCC requirements. Based on the mandate, carriers won?t have to provide altitude information. But if the caller is in a 50-story office building, 125 meters suddenly covers a lot more territory.
No Shortage of Solutions
The laws of physics are stubborn, but E-911 vendors have made some amazing progress by either getting around them or turning them into assets. The result is a sort of industry bake-off, where dozens of vendors angle for market share in what?s quickly becoming a crowded industry.
?I don?t think there?s a single technology that stands out, and that?s why you see everyone struggling with the direction they want to go,? said Jim Carroll, US West 911 new-product manager.
One popular approach is angle of arrival (AOA), which uses an array of smart antennas at one or more base stations to receive different phases of the same signal. By comparing the phases, a computer can determine the angles from which they arrived and locate the general area where the signal originated.
One drawback to AOA is that its accuracy can suffer when the caller is located directly between the two base stations. That could pose a problem for carriers serving rural interstates, where cell sites often are lined up along the highway. AOA also requires installing additional antenna arrays at each cell site.
Another popular solution is time difference of arrival (TDOA), which compares the different times that an E-911 signal arrives at two or more base stations. Some vendors combine AOA and TDOA to improve accuracy and limit the effects of multipath.
One of the more unusual E-911 solutions is fingerprinting. Every location from which a call originates produces a unique ?fingerprint? consisting of attributes such as the signal?s angle of arrival and the multipath signals. A drive-around builds a database of fingerprints, and each E-911 call is compared against that database to find the most statistically probable location.
One persistent question about fingerprinting is whether it will work in rural environments where multipath is limited. U.S. Wireless? RadioCamera uses fingerprinting, and its tests in Billings, MT, seem to confirm that there?s enough multipath to achieve accuracy averaging 27 meters.
?Even in rural areas, short of the Sahara Desert, you in fact have multipath content all the time,? Matsumori said.
Virtually all handset-based solutions incorporate GPS receivers. GPS could be an attractive solution for carriers because the infrastructure ? 24 geostationary satellites operated by the U.S. Department of Defense ? already is in place, and it is ubiquitous.
But GPS suffers just as much as wireless in an urban environment, where overpasses, tunnels and the insides of buildings block views of the satellites and significantly attenuate the GPS signal. Vendors argue that those hurdles aren?t insurmountable. SnapTrack said its use of a GPS receiver that is 100 times more sensitive than a conventional unit makes the system usable indoors, and Tendler Cellular argued that GPS still is good enough.
?What are you trying to do?? said Robert Tendler, chairman. ?Are you trying to give some modest information ? 125 meters 67% of the time ? to the authorities? Or are you saying, ?How close could you get the accuracy?? Everybody loves to talk in terms of accuracy, but the problem we?re trying to solve is getting the cops somewhere in the vicinity.?
As a vehicle for value-added services, GPS also is hampered by selective availability (SA), the defense department?s 50-meter accuracy limit for national security. Clinton administration policy requires SA to be discontinued by 2006.
?It could be sooner,? said Steve Moran of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. ?It depends on how quickly the military can get ready for operations without SA. Obviously, there is pressure from all different sources to turn it off as soon as possible.?
Like any handset solution, GPS requires resolving issues such as increased battery drain and swapping out subscriber handsets.
?The biggest drawback to GPS is that you have to get all those handsets changed out,? said Carroll of US West, which has worked with vendors to test GPS solutions in Denver. ?But I also think that because of the other services that carriers will be able to offer, there?s a motivation for those carriers to get those handsets into their subscribers? hands.
?I think the final decision about the technology isn?t going to be driven by 911 at all,? he said. ?It?s going to be driven by the large service providers, the folks who are going to be doing the concierge service and fleet-tracking.?
A New Asset?
Safety always has been wireless? ace in the hole, and E-911 is no exception. But for carriers large and small, value-added services will defray the bulk of E-911?s costs. Just how much more consumers are willing to pay for those services is another question.
?Our research shows customers will pay between $8 and $10 a month for a basic emergency package,? said Protection One?s Millstein.
Tendler said his plan pushes that price even lower. ?We?ve got a way for everybody to make money at $4.95 a month for a 3-year, no-cut contract.?
The appeal of value-added services could vary according to demographic, but safety-first marketing might convince the skeptics and put wireless in more hands.
?What we?re seeing is men want the location-based services so they can give it to a family member,? said Gary Wallace, Protection One marketing director. ?If you put a lot of other features on it, then the men get even hotter for it because they see a use they have for it. If it has an emergency button on it, a lot of the Baby Boom generation believes it?s essentially a way to get mom and dad to use a cell phone. Usually, that?s an age group that?s really reluctant to use a cell phone.?
But at a recent E-911 conference, it was clear that carriers still aren?t sure how they can market location-finding services. ?The carriers were basically saying, ?Look, we know we need to buy this for the FCC requirement, and we know we?re going to want to leverage the infrastructure for commercial applications. But today, we don?t have all the information to tell you what the system needs to be able to do and what the product environments are,?? said Bill Taliaferro, Corsair Communications product-marketing director. ?And the reason for that is their marketing departments haven?t really dealt with what exactly the business case is for these commercial applications.?
In addition to serving as a vehicle for lucrative enhanced services, E-911 also could prove a powerful bargaining chip at zoning hearings because it intertwines public safety and build-outs. ?I think there?s a mutual understanding of the other side?s issues,? said David Aylward, executive director of the ComCARE Alliance, whose members include trauma surgeons and public-safety officials. ?We have nurses explaining to Congressmen why siting needs to occur. That wasn?t happening six months ago.?
That spirit of working toward a common goal also pervades the E-911-vendor community. ?I think he?s brilliant,? one vendor gushed of a competitor. That?s what it?s going to take. |
