If we applied human attributes to mobile location services, they would be in preschool today, learning and acquiring the skills they will need to have a long and successful life in a world where bigger and tougher kids are always around the corner.
While still young and impressionable, mobile location services hold tremendous revenue-generating potential for wireless carriers of all sizes. But for small to mid-size carriers that don’t have the geographical or financial muscle to get the attention of mobile location and telematics service providers up front, the task is proving to be more challenging.
“It (deploying mobile location services) puts a huge burden on us to get the resources in place,” said Brian Fingerson, vice president of engineering and technology for Midwest Wireless Holdings L.L.C., which serves about 185,000 customers in Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin. “The location technology companies are so busy with the top-tier companies that it has been difficult to get their attention and do some trials. We’re trying to learn from the major carriers, from their trials, and how they are going.”
E911 challenges
Fueled by the Federal Communications Commission E911 mandate, second-tier carriers are in the thick of the race to deploy value-added and emergency mobile location services for their customers. There has been much talk about applications that offer driving directions and facility locations, but are they appropriate for cellular customers living in a town with 2,000 people?
Scott Donlea, vice president of market development for Rural Cellular Corp., said Rural Cellular already has agreements in place with General Motors Corp.’s Onstar subsidiary for telematics services, and mobile location services in general are something the company has been excited about for a long time. The company serves approximately 466,000 customers in 13 states.
Fingerson said Midwest Wireless is conducting a WAP and two-way short message service trial.
From a vendor’s vantage point, the demand definitely is there for non-emergency location applications, said George Marble, vice president of marketing for E911 network equipment provider Grayson Wireless, a division of Allen Telecom.
“I have seen just as much interest and support in implementing systems that support value-added services for rural carriers as for the larger carriers,” Marble said.
Second-tier carriers see potential for revenue, aided by the fact that mobile location services will allow them to carry larger carriers’ traffic as customers roam throughout the different coverage areas.
Before carriers can get too excited about value-add services however, they must deal with the E911 Phase II requirement. All carriers were supposed to declare a technology-either network- or handset-based-on Nov. 9, and because the big three carriers (Verizon Wireless, AT&T Wireless Services Inc. and Cingular Wireless) cover so much of the country, their choice has a definite impact on the E911 future of second-tier carriers whose coverage areas bleed into and intersect those of the big three.
“The larger carriers really mandate the direction our technology partners are going to take. At the end of the day, those are the solutions that are going to be implemented,” Donlea said.
Rural Cellular chose a handset-based solution in part because there are not enough cell sites close enough together in some of the company’s footprint to support the necessary triangulation required by reliable network-based solutions, said Donlea. A handset solution also may be less expensive.
Donlea said he has concerns about the cost-effectiveness of Phase II technology. He estimated the average response time for a 911 call in rural Minnesota is about 20 minutes, based solely on the fact that many people in that area are several miles away from a hospital.
“You still have to get there and it’s a long way to do that,” Donlea said.
All carriers have implementation cost concerns, said Marble.
“The concerns that the smaller carriers generally have is they have less density of subscribers per area served,” Marble said.
Value adds
Deployment costs aside, the consensus is mobile location services have a definitive place in the future business plans of smaller carriers. Safety applications are expected to offer the most value to rural customers, but weather reports and location-specific advertising and promotions also will be in demand.
Commercial applications are expected to be in place by the end of this year or early 2002.
Some of the earliest needs for location-aware services will come from customers who are roaming, and consequently, the larger carriers will continue to put pressure on the smaller carriers to get mobile location services deployed so roaming charges can be collected, said David Kerr, director of wireless programs with Strategy Analytics.
“It (mobile location services) will further underlie the need for these smaller players to be a part of affinity programs and to be in alliances with the national and multinational players,” Kerr said.
