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Telematics – an intelligent future, like it or not
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April/May 2003
LBS - serious tracking challenge to GPS?
Tracking that relies purely on mobile phones is here now, says Peter Rowlands Can you track vehicles and people effectively just by monitoring the location of mobile phones? That's the proposition being offered by the new generation of tracking systems now coming on to the market. There's no GPS unit or other on-board equipment involved; you just use existing mobile phones. So set-up costs are low or non-existent. And tracking can be done over the Internet, so there's no software overhead either. With some systems you can even pay as you go. What you don't necessarily get is full integration with your back-office systems, or highly accurate position plots. GPS is nowadays accurate to a few metres, whereas the best that LBS tracking can manage is 50 to 100 metres, even that is in urban areas where there are many mobile phone transmission masts. In rural areas it could fall to 1km or worse. 
Nevertheless, suppliers argue that this degree of accuracy is perfectly adequate for typical applications in logistics and field service. And on the plus side, LBS tracking can be more reliable than GPS tracking in city environments, where "urban canyons" can block out signals from GPS satellites. Early LBS initiatives tended to focus on targeted consumer marketing - for instance, alerting shoppers when they were near a particular restaurant - but suppliers soon realised that the hype behind this tended to exceed the practical benefits. Tracking and location are among the more viable business applications now emerging. Possibly the most ambitious in the initial crop of services is FleetOnline from Dutch-based Teydo Company, a new start-up created specifically to develop it. It has just been given its worldwide launch in the UK, but will be rolled out to six European countries by the year end, and managing director Erik Jansen says the company has secured agreement from no fewer than 26 mobile phone networks to support it. These include all four major UK operators. A clever feature of this system is that charging can be done purely through existing mobile phone accounts. All position updates from mobiles in the system are charged to the account of the master account-holder; so it's truly a pay-as-you-go operation. Moreover, there's no set-up charge or registration fee. FleetOnline worked with Tele Atlas to provide on-screen raster mapping and GeoDan to provide the mapping "engine" that puts dots on the map and delivers it over the Internet. Swedish consultancy Teleca built the Web site, and UK-based Carbon Copy created the user interface. Overview Mapping is also working with all four major UK mobile phone networks on its Verilocation service, and is offering a choice of either a subscription-based service or a pay-as-you-go service between mobile phones. The subscription version is more sophisticated, and involves a one-off £249 sign-up fee plus £20 per mobile, and then 20p upwards per live track. A helpful feature is that users can pre-pay for "track credits" online via Worldpay. Scottish-based Justfone currently restricts its service to the O2 mobile phone network, but is talking encouragingly about offering a range of vehicle tracking and fleet management systems, and it is also working with Argyll Telecom to offer lone worker tracking. While accuracy of tracking with LBS systems may not be of the highest, it is possible to enhance it by something called "assisted GPS" or A-GPS. Mobile operators such as Alcatel are already working on this concept, which marries special software in the handset with a "reference" GPS signal, correcting the positioning fix to the same degree of accuracy as GPS. Overview Mapping has been developing a less complex approach, in which it links the tracking information with displays using its own UK digital street mapping to estimate the exact location of the mobile. FleetOnline's Erik Jansen by contrast argues that a system which makes no "guesses" about the true location of mobiles is preferable. That debate could run and run. A North East-based firm, GlobalPoint Technologies, is among those suppliers developing a third approach. It offers an add-on GPS module costing £299 for attaching to a mobile phone (Siemens or Nokia models are currently supported), and can supply the whole package including dual-band mobile phone. It says the system also supports A-GPS. In the early days of LBS, mobile phone network operators were wary of opening up their tracking information because of worries over privacy and data protection issues, but now they have evolved fairly perfunctory processes for adding individual mobiles to specific tracking services. In the FleetOnline service, for instance, the user simply nominates the phone numbers to be tracked, and the mobile network sends each an individual SMS message requesting authorisation by return. How easy is it to integrate these systems with other fleet management systems? FleetOnline's Erik Jansen says APIs (application programming interfaces) have been included at the server level to allow third parties to do the integrating as required, but integration is not being offered as standard. "We wanted to keep the initial service as straightforward as possible." It is also willing to provide its underlying Mobispot positioning technology to other service suppliers, or even to "own-brand" the FleetOnline service for them.
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