Subject: [NEXTEL-1] After years of struggle, GPS is taking off

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 12 Apr 2004 03:02:19 -0400

After years of struggle, GPS is taking off
By Michael Kanellos
CNET News.com
April 9, 2004, 4:00 AM PT
URL: http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-5187758.html

Finding yourself, or someone else, is starting to pay off.

After several years of unfulfilled promises, the market for products
that use Global Positioning System
(GPS) technology is beginning to take off, in part due to government
regulations, customer acceptance
and technological improvements. GPS can pinpoint an individual's
location through satellite signals.

GPS chip designer SiRF Technology, for instance, has seen its revenue
grow from $15 million in 2001
to $30.4 million in 2002 to $73.1 million last year.

News.context

What's new:
GPS chip designer SiRF Technology is poised for an initial public
offering, one of a number of signs
that the GPS market is picking up.

Bottom line:
GPS technology itself is hardly new. But the market is heating up in
response to
technological advances, consumer interest and government mandates for
emergency
services.

More stories on this topic

San Jose, Calif.-based SiRF, which stands for silicon radio frequency,
turned a profit last year and is
expected to begin public trading on April 19, according to filings from
the Securities and Exchange
Commission. The initial trading price is expected to be $10 to $12 per
share for 10 million shares. (In
recent months, seasoned companies have experienced significant price
jumps on their first day of
trading.)

Investors in SiRF include Dell, Nokia, Intel, Matsushita and MiC, an NTT
DoCoMo affiliate.

Meanwhile, chip designer Qualcomm is providing its GPS One technology to
15 carriers worldwide
and around 20 handset manufacturers. Approximately 120 cell phone models
contain
Qualcomm-based GPS units. Along with providing chips, Qualcomm sells
server software for
improving GPS speed and accuracy.

"Now that we've got the technology in the marketplace, we are focusing
on developers coming up
with different applications," said Steve Brown, vice president for
Qualcomm's Internet services
division.

The recent surge in GPS, at least in the United States, can be largely
traced to the Federal
Communications Commission's E911 mandate. Under E911, cellular carriers
must ensure that, by the
end of 2005, 95 percent of the phones on their networks can be located
by rescue workers when
people dial 911.

While carriers have experimented with various ideas for implementing
E911, such as the oft-criticized
Enhanced Observed Time Difference (EOTD), the emerging technology of
choice for many appears
to be GPS, or a form of GPS that can be enhanced through cellular
positioning. Sprint, Verizon
Wireless and Nextel Communications are adopting a form of GPS for E911.

The main technological rival to this form of GPS is now Time Difference
of Arrival (TDOA), which
determines a phone's position by measuring the time a call reaches
"location measuring units" inside a
cell phone network base station. T-Mobile, Cingular Wireless and AT&T
Wireless, which Cingular is
buying, switched from EOTD to TDOA last year.

Purely cellular systems like TDOA, however, demand base station
upgrades. GPS requires server
software upgrades and is more accurate, advocates say.

But consumer demand for GPS is growing, and companies are taking note.
Although not required by
regulation, Hutcheson's 3G networks being built in Europe and Southeast
Asia will support GPS
tracking. In Japan and Korea, NTT DoCoMo, SK Telecom and KDDI are
providing location-based
GPS services and content.

Recently, KDDI surpassed rival NTT DoCoMo in signing new subscribers,
Brown said. The company
attributed the gain to EasyNaviWalk, a personal navigation application
that tracks an individual's
movements through a combination of GPS signals and processing that takes
place on the handset.

"It is really being embraced as the technology of choice, going forward"
for European carriers, Brown
said. In Latin America, the ability to track people is becoming
attractive. "Personal security is a big
issue there," he added.

Putting in-car in drive
General Motors is seeing increased subscriptions and use of its
GPS-based OnStar in-car help system,
said Tony Scott, chief information officer of GM, in a recent interview.
Consulting firm Gartner
predicts that GPS-based car navigation will grow from 8.7 million cars
today to 16 million by 2006.
Toyota and Honda include similar navigational and help systems in many
of their models.

Mapping software that will allow a dispatcher to look at a screen and
see the geographic location of all
on-duty drivers or technicians could also enjoy a strong market, said
Paul Dittner, a wireless analyst at
Gartner.

"One application that we know will take off is the 'Where are my
friends' sort of thing," Dittner said.
"The FCC is driving what you are seeing now, but in addition to that,
there is an interest and need for
location-based services."

Nonetheless, GPS isn't exactly an overnight phenomenon. A host of
companies, many in Japan, have
tried to popularize the technology since the mid-1990s.

A GPS module, which includes a GPS chipset and a few other components, a
few years ago would
have cost $200 to $300 and would have been relatively bulky, said Kanwar
Chadha, vice president of
marketing at SiRF. Chadha also helped found the company in 1995.

Due to Moore's Law, a complete module costs around $40 to $50, he said.
Still, cell phone makers
want to get the price of GPS functionality down to $20 or even $10, so
chip designers are coming up
with ways to integrate the technology into other chips, Chadha said.

One solution, which is gaining popularity, is for chip designers to
simply sell the intellectual property
rather than the chips. That way, a phone manufacturer could integrate
GPS functionality into the
processor and other necessary chips inside a cell phone. Motorola has
already shifted from buying
chips from SiRF to licensing technology, Chadha said.

"Some of these challenges you can't meet with standalone chips," he
said. "It took longer than
expected, but even then it was clear that there is a mass-market appeal
to the technology."

Qualcomm bundles its GPS chip technology into the majority of its
chipsets at no additional charge.
The only extra hardware that's required is an antenna, which costs about
$1. Handset makers have to
build their phones around Qualcomm silicon.

Privacy issues and ensuring that different location services will be
compatible with a wide range of
phones also have to be ironed out before mass acceptance of commercial
location services.

Local obstructions
The focus of modern GPS specialists can be boiled down to words:
buildings and trees. In the 1990s,
many GPS developers spent most of their energy honing the precision of
their devices, which were
targeted at building contractors and the military.

By contrast, accuracy in the consumer market is more of a relative
concept--pinpointing a location to 5
meters to 20 meters is generally close enough. So developers started to
concentrate on figuring out
ways to navigate natural obstacles.

"Nobody was focused on how to make the system for urban canyons or dense
foliage," Chadha said.
"It was focused on how to get within a millimeter of accuracy, not how
to get a quicker response."

The urban canyon problem, he said, is largely an issue of speed.
Satellite signals can only be
intercepted by a moving target for brief periods of time before
buildings block them again, Chadha
said. To get around the problem, the company incorporated 240
correlators, which search for satellite
signals, into its first chipsets. Typical chipsets at the time contained
around 50 correlators.

"The more correlators, the more deep and broad the search," Chadha said.
"You need a satellite
search engine that is very fast."

The second round of SiRF chipsets then concentrated on eliminating the
foliage problem. In forests,
signals don't necessarily get blocked, but they can be attenuated by
leaves or other objects. Thus,
chips have to be capable of catching weak signals.

The E911 mandate also made speed a problem. In traditional GPS systems,
a cell phone latches onto
an identifying satellite signal in a few milliseconds and then sends a
signal to the satellite. Sending a
signal to a satellite confirms the user's position, but it takes about
30 seconds. The second signal is
important because it determines the location of the satellite relative
to the user. E911 demands that a
user's position be fixed in a few seconds.

To get around that problem, both SiRF and Qualcomm have developed server
software that tracks the
satellites. Thus, in an E911 situation, the phone snags a signal from
the satellite, and then grabs
information regarding the location of the orbiting satellite from the
terrestrial server. The whole
process takes about two to three seconds.

Qualcomm additionally reinforces GPS positioning with Advanced Forward
Link Trilateration, a
cellular-based tracking system that kicks in when the results from the
satellite systems are hazy.

The San Diego-based company also has begun to market hosting services in
North America for
customers who want to expand beyond E911 applications.

While a number of companies have in-house GPS technology, Qualcomm and
SiRF are two of the
more visible. Qualcomm, which boosted its GPS intellectual property by
buying SnapTrack in March
2000, has landed deals with, among others, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, China
Unicom, Verizon and
Sprint.

Smaller SiRF meanwhile, has inserted its technology into Motorola
phones--despite the fact that
Motorola has its own GPS silicon--as well as into Hewlett-Packard
handhelds and cars from Toyota
and Honda.

Still, as the market grows, more will likely enter it, Qualcomm's Brown
said.

"You are going to hear a lot of new names," he said.

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