Skyhook Wireless, a 2-year-old company based in Boston, announced commercial availability of a wide-area positioning system that makes use of the growing number of Wi-Fi access points being deployed around the world.
The company last week announced a deal with TeleCommunication Systems Inc. that calls for TSI to integrate Skyhook’s Wi-Fi positioning system with its Voice over Internet Protocol E-911 service.
“Our solution basically turns any Wi-Fi device into a GPS device without adding any hardware,” said Ted Morgan, founder and chief executive officer of the company.
Morgan said today about 25 million access points are deployed across the country in residences and businesses. There are so many access points deployed that the signals from those access points overlap to a large extent, he said.
The company saw an opportunity to use that overlap to determine locations. It set out to create a database of 802.11 access points by performing a street-by-street scan of major metropolitan areas to collect location information on and mark all of the 802.11 networks it could detect.
Skyhook’s Wi-Fi Positioning System determines the position of Wi-Fi-enabled devices, including laptop computers, personal digital assistants and smart phones, without requiring new hardware to be added. When they come into range of a public or private wireless access point, these devices receive signals from the Wi-Fi sites. Skyhook’s software compares the identity of the access points in range of the device to its database of access points and uses positioning algorithms to compute a location.
The process takes about a second and can provide location accuracy in the range of 20 to 40 meters, according to the company.
The company said its system is available in the 25 largest metropolitan networks in the United States and has 1.5 million access points represented in its database. Morgan said the company is working toward implementing its system in the top 100 markets by the end of this year and plans to expand overseas in the future.
Morgan said on average a user with a Wi-Fi device in an urban area is in range of 10 access points. In a dense urban area like Manhattan, users will often be within range of 25 to 30 access points at a given time. Morgan said the more overlap of access points, the higher level of accuracy the system can achieve, but the system requires only two or three access points to achieve precision accuracy levels.
The company’s system allows many of the same applications that traditional network- and handset-based location systems provide. Skyhook has identified mapping and navigation, E-911, fleet and asset tracking and location-based advertising to target its product.
Morgan said the system is not a replacement for current wireless E-911 positioning systems but rather will work in tandem with those systems because it can add an extra layer of accuracy in urban areas where traditional positioning systems can have some difficulty pinpointing locations due to multipath. The system also does not have a line-of-sight requirement, allowing it to determine positions both indoors and outdoors with equal accuracy, another stumbling block for traditional positioning systems.
Skyhook also announced one of the first customers for its system. The company worked together with CyberAngel Security Solutions Inc., which provides laptop recovery services, to develop Wi-Fi Tracker, a system that quickly locates stolen laptop computers and other equipment, thereby reducing the risk of identity and sensitive corporate or government data being compromised.
Based on Skyhook’s WPS, the Wi-Fi Tracker system sends a silent message to CyberAngel’s monitoring center that includes identifying information about the computer as well as a latitude and longitude location of the device. CyberAngel then coordinates with local law enforcement to recover the device.
Current recovery times for stolen laptops can take several days or weeks, because subpoenas are often required. Bradley Lide, president and CEO of CyberAngel, said the company expects the Skyhook WPS will help it reduce recovery times to two or three days by eliminating some of the subpoena processes.
Lide said the system also helps it address metropolitan access networks and other public Wi-Fi hot spots where it traditionally would have difficulty determining which user has accessed the network using stolen equipment.
CyberAngel’s software is marketed and sold primarily to corporate clients, universities and government agencies, said Lide.
The Wi-Fi Tracker system is scheduled to be available this summer, the company said.
