Eyeing the upcoming Fifa World Cup and Olympic Games, the U.S.-based location determination company TruePosition, Inc., said it is trying to establish business relationships with local government agencies to help provide reliable estimates of crowd sizes and to locate people quickly.
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“Many visitors do not speak Portuguese and might not be able to say where they are during big events,” Brian Varano, TruePosition’s director of marketing, told RCR Wireless News. Locating people accurately is important during emergencies and in order to respond to calls for help.
Varano visited Brazil in the beginning of April to showcase TruePosition’s mobile intelligence capabilities for national security applications. Its core technology – the TruePosition Location Platform – is a system of ultra-sensitive devices installed in transmission antennae of mobile operators. TruePosition has an office in Miami (U.S.) to cover the Latin American region.
>>> Listen to excerpts of Brian Varano’s interview.
According to the company, these devices are much more sensitive and accurate than any location derived by GPS and are able to locate and track in real time any connection that passes through its antennae. Varano also noted that GPS does not work well indoors or in cities with high building.
Recently, industry-analyst firm Ovum released a white paper detailing the importance of locating indoor 9-1-1 phone calls in the United States that are made from cell phones. “The test results show that certain wireless location technologies have limited performance when attempting to locate a 9-1-1 call made from inside of a building,” said Jeremy Green, principal analyst for Ovum. “This seems rather alarming because there are millions of wireless 9-1-1 calls that are made indoors every year.”
Be sure to read:
- Reality Check: New FCC proposed rules may lead to better location accuracy for E911 calls
- TruePosition, ABI test network-based vs. handset-based 911 solutions
