What Lies Ahead for LBS

The Where Business
June 21st, 2010

Where will location-based services (LBS) gain the most from 4G technology? One answer is that 4G will deliver something that sounds deceptively simple yet remains annoyingly elusive for 3G, reports Christopher Backeberg - the ability to locate a mobile phone user precisely. 

Manlio Allegra, president and CEO of Polaris Wireless, has neatly summed up why this is such an important challenge. He said: "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. In the gathering commercial LBS marketplace, indoors and urban areas are where it's at."

Part one of this two-part feature presented a short overview of where 3G technology is right now, then pointed towards some of the general developments that 4G (fourth generation) mobile communications will encourage. This concluding instalment summarises which 4G technology is expected to dominate; some of the mobile technical enhancements that will become practical with 4G; how LBS will evolve for consumers, enterprises and advertisers; and which organisations are likely to gain or lose based on their current strategies.

The shift towards LTE

Here's the 4G debate of the moment: WiMax or LTE? According to ABI Research, the first really significant pointer to the eventual outcome has emerged in Russia.

ABI reported just over a week ago that Russian operator Yota had announced its intention to cover its next 15 cities with LTE, not WiMax, as it phases in its 4G service. Yota added that Moscow and St. Petersburg would have full LTE coverage by the end of next year.

ABI views this as "the first sign of the much-debated shift in operator loyalties from WiMax to TD-LTE."

Let's quickly clarify what we're talking about.

• WiMax (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) is a telecommunications protocol that provides fixed and fully mobile Internet access through metropolitan area networks.

• LTE (Long Term Evolution) is a high-performance air interface for cellular mobile telephony. LTE has already received a powerful endorsement in the USA. Public safety agencies in the US have stated their preference for LTE for the new 700MHz public safety radio band.

TD-LTE, a high-definition application of LTE, is still largely experimental. ABI noted that it would take some time for TD-LTE to be deployed outside its core markets, such as like China.

ABI has released a useful tool for keeping track of 4G locations. At present there are about 1,000 4G locations worldwide, and roughly as many fixed 802.16d locations which are not strictly 4G. With 4G in a state of flux, the number of installations is growing rapidly.

ABI's 4G Deployment Tracker is based on Google Earth. It displays location and other critical data for every known 4G network, and the supporting database will be updated quarterly. Cities with 4G deployments are indicated by colour-coded push-pins showing the type of 4G air interface.

Location and pattern matching

LBS has been given a head start in the move to 4G, according to Polaris's Manlio Allegra. He points out that many operators are already investing in the technology needed for next-generation LBS.

One such investment has occurred in pattern-matching technologies that refine and harden the location element in mission-critical public safety applications such as emergency response, government security and law enforcement. Pattern matching is being extended to commercial LBS.

Manlio comments: "Breakthroughs in how precisely, quickly and reliably mobile devices can be pinpointed are set to transform the LBS user experience."

Commercial LBS in its current form is typically limited to turn-by-turn navigation and points of interest or mobile search. This is where the weakness described by Manlio becomes evident, namely, the difficulty of achieving precise location.

Network-based pattern matching offers one solution. It is a software-based location method that operates independently of Wi-Fi or GPS on/off settings. The operator and the user need no additional hardware for pattern matching to work.

In this solution, the signal strength data, time delays and other network measurements are compared against a database of predicted values. Since every mobile device has a unique signature value, the device can be identified and located accordingly. Pattern matching can locate devices across an operator's entire subscriber base.

Pattern matching is becoming more precise. Currently it can locate a mobile subscriber to within 50 metres, consistently and in real time, even when the user is indoors or in an urban canyon. However, Manlio says: "Shadowing from large buildings, walls and other complex clutter actually enriches the location signature and increases the precision. As more capabilities and sensors are introduced in future handsets and as networks grow denser, pattern-matching technologies will continue to refine accuracy levels to less than 10 meters."

Brent Iadarola, research director for Frost & Sullivan's mobile and wireless communications, observes that pattern matching has proved good enough for compliance with emergency services regulations such as the US Federal Communications Commission E911 Phase II.

He adds: "The good news for operators implementing Phase II E911 solutions is that the billions of dollars required to implement these emergency services can be leveraged by US operators to produce commercial LBS."

LBS maps in three dimensions

There are several good reasons why most of the current map applications used in LBS are based on two-dimensional rather than 3D maps. Developers for mobile are usually constrained by factors that may include the cost and time of map data transfer to mobile devices, the visual limitations of the small screens on smartphones, the imprecision of location under various circumstances, and the lack of suitable map-creation models and software for suitable texturing and rendering in portable digital maps.

The full advent of 4G should change all that. Along with higher speed and better location, it should be accompanied by more efficient map modelling methods.

Four professors in fields of communications technology told TelecomsEurope how they envisaged the development of modelling methods "to meet the application requirements of personal navigation: small model size, high accuracy, and good visual appearance." (The gentlemen in question were Professors Chen Ruizhi, Zhang Jixian, Jarmo Takala and Wang Jianyu.)

They suggest that the current 3D city models designed for desktop applications could be modified for mobiles. They say applications for engineering design, environmental modelling and urban planning would be good to adapt for smartphones, making it possible "to render 3D scenes in real time, enriching contents and user experience for personal navigation and LBS."

3D visualisation requires a large amount of computing power. It is a challenging task to implement 3D visualisation in an embedded system such as a smartphone. The professors note that most of the difficulty lurks in the elements in the component layer, and especially in the visualisation engine. The high-level 3D visualisation engine architecture covers the interface layer, the core engine layer and the data management layer.

To overcome this and other technical obstacles, they suggest a model in which only a small subset of map data has to be loaded dynamically. Small model size can then be achieved by simplified object geometry and reduced texture resolution. The model accuracy can be controlled by extracting building outlines from a classified point cloud and overlapping with the final 3D model.

The net result of evolution in 3D map modelling should be more accurate maps that are downloaded in small portions, only 100 KB at a time, yet deliver a compelling visual effect complete with photo-realistic textures.

Enterprise and consumer LBS

For enterprises, future LBS applications may be more of what you're already using, but they will be bigger, better and faster.

According to Kyle McInnes, editor in chief of BlackBerry Cool, enterprise LBS will still focus on effective asset management. It will be applied to cut costs and provide insights into the business. McInnes says: "In tandem with technologies such as RFID, an organisation can track products, employees and customers."

As a BlackBerry man he comments that GPS-enabled BlackBerry devices make device management more cost effective, allowing IT administrators to find lost or stolen mobiles more easily and quickly. He adds: "Many organisations have custom-built location solutions for scenarios such as tracking fleets or red-flagging points in infrastructure."

Enterprise LBS has a lower media profile than consumer LBS. It does its job with an admirable absence of fuss and fanfare, unlike some of the glitz and froth that drips from the more gimmicky LBS apps.

However, there are many consumer LBS apps that serve extremely valuable purposes, as McInnes explains: "Location-based services like Loopt add a new dimension to social networking, and services like Poynt make finding relevant local information easier to discover."

He believes future LBS for consumers will increasingly turn to local content: "For consumers, the world around us will become increasingly small, with local content becoming more accessible. Everything from social networks to music services can benefit from serving local content."

Untargeted markets for location-based advertising

Ogilvy One and Acision have predicted that the proliferation of 3G networks and the advent of 4G will lead to significant growth in the mobile advertising. They also predict that by 2020 advertising will be far more people-centric, built around the delivery of far more personalised ads based on individual tastes and preferences.

Bite The Apple notes that 61 percent of the world's population currently uses cell phones. Right now, the mobile market represents a potential client base of about 4.3 billion people.

Yet only a small portion of this market is being targeted with full vigour. According to Bite The Apple, marketers and advertisers tend to put an undue amount of their money into advertising on the iPhone. For all its excellence, the iPhone holds only 11 percent of the market for mobile phones. "That leaves literally 89 percent of cell phone users that are not targeted," suggests Bite The Apple.

With 4G, advertisers will have vastly more opportunity to deliver content-rich multimedia advertising. However the current battle for dominance in mobile advertising may pan out, there is no doubt that device makers other than Apple will ensure that their hardware keeps pace with everything 4G can provide.

Winners and losers

TechCrunch published the predictions by Robert Scoble, widely followed news blogger, on who is currently positioned to score big or lose out as 4G adds its new competitive impetus to the mobile market. In summary, here's who he identified.

As potential winners, Scoble picked:

• Apple, because it owns Siri, which in Scoble's opinion is "the best UI for smartphones for interacting with the world around you"

• Google, because it already has so much location and scheduling data and is gathering more every day

• Facebook, because it already has so much data about people that it can use to present location information

• SimpleGeo, because it is becoming an arbitrage system for moving data in real time between all of these players

Scoble's likely losers are:

• Yahoo, because it hasn't figured out how to get its users to share much location data

• Microsoft, because "it is locked out of most of this new world"

• Gowalla, Brightkite and Whrrl, because they haven't made any moves to present malleable social graphs in the way Foursquare does

• Individual loyalty programmes, because after the popularity of the first such programmes, consumers will become yawningly unengaged

Read More