Polaris gives the lowdown on location

The Where Business
August 3rd, 2010

In a longer-than-usual interview, TheWhereBusiness writer Christopher Backeberg asks for and receives some highly illuminating education on location technology from Manlio Allegra, CEO of Polaris Wireless... 

After writing for TheWhereBusiness about less frequently discussed mobile technologies such as radio frequency pattern matching and other alternatives to determine location, the opportunity to pick Manlio Allegra's brain was too good to miss.

This interview goes beyond the specialised location methods that Polaris has been developing to great effect. In the course of describing the ins and outs of pattern matching, for example, Manlio also relates current developments to the state of the art in GPS, A-GPS, Wi-Fi and other technologies. Thus he has effectively given us a crisp overview of mobile location technology in general.

Acording to the Polaris Wireless website, the Polaris WLS technology enables Polaris products to outperform other solutions in dense urban and indoor environments where line-of-sight is not always available. Polaris says its products have greater accuracy and reliability and lower ownership and maintenance costs than other network-based solutions in suburban and rural environments.

Polaris WLS is currently the only technology that can perform high accuracy mass (bulk) location. The company describes this technology as "future-proof" and eminently suitable for 2G, 3G and 4G networks using control plane or secure user plane (SUPL).

The man at the helm for Polaris, Manlio Allegra, has more than 20 years of experience in international business development and general management with Fortune 500 and start-up companies. He holds an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business and an MSEE in Electrical Engineering from Milan Polytechnic Institute.

TheWhereBusiness: You've been quoted as saying: "To attract a new wave of interest from business customers or consumers, next-generation commercial LBS must be able to rapidly and precisely locate any and all users automatically where people live and work - inside places like office buildings, shopping malls and homes." How key is the "automatic" part of such location, and how common is it right now?

Manlio Allegra: Right now, there tend to be different location technologies at play. On one side are network-based approaches, like Polaris's Wireless Location Signatures (WLS), which work well in high cell density environments like urban and indoor, but not as well in sparse rural. On the other are handset-based approaches using GPS and A-GPS, which work well in open sky suburban and rural, but not in urban and indoor. In either scenario, the LBS user gets good performance in some places but not others - hence the user experience can be far from ideal.

The "automatic" part of locating users everywhere is based on hybrid systems, blending both network-based and handset-based technologies. This delivers the best of both worlds. Hybrid systems can provide consistent location accuracy across all environments, including urban, suburban, rural and indoor.

Even more than that, intelligent approaches, like Polaris's best-of-breed hybrid system, mix and match appropriate technologies to provide the best overall user experience tailored to the particular LBS application - not just excellent location accuracy, but also short time to fix and low battery drain.

Hybrid systems deliver the automation that's required to transform next-gen LBS into the seamless and transparent location-awareness that defines other pervasive technologies. 

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