S5 Wireless announced the successful testing of its location based services network in Salt Lake City, Utah. All elements of the S5 system infrastructure were involved in the test, including tags, base stations, location and telemetry servers and network operations centers.
Dominique Bonte, principal analyst with ABI Research, said, "Location technologies are becoming increasingly important as new location based services and markets are being targeted. A huge market opportunity exists for the tracking and tracing of vehicles, persons, pets, assets and equipment, providing security and protection and addressing both consumer and business needs.
The availability of miniaturized, low cost and low power location devices and systems providing deep indoor coverage will be a key requirement for the mass market adoption of these services. A specific opportunity also exists for the location of calls made from VoIP E9-1-1 devices."
"The early success of our test network is a significant milestone toward bringing this ground-breaking location and telemetry technology to the mass market," said David Carter, CEO and President of S5 Wireless.
"Our wide-area S5 solution addresses a significant market opportunity currently unfulfilled by existing location and telemetry offerings. S5 and our partners look forward to meeting the growing demand for cutting edge location products and services, ultimately transforming the way the world finds and protects its people and property."
Test results generated using S5's existing network in Salt Lake City demonstrated high location accuracy in all environments. Location accuracy was observed to be better than 9 meters (indoor) and 14 meters (outdoor) for the majority of test locations.
These initial results were significantly better than the requirements recently put forth by the FCC for E9-1-1 location in their recent NPRM (07-114) and provide better performance than that reported by alternate location technologies. Further, the S5 network and solution is anticipated to further improve as system performance and deployments are optimized.
Network test results confirmed location accuracy similar to GPS-based handsets for E9-1-1 emergency location, while also providing the ability to accurately locate people or objects indoors. This high capacity, ubiquitous operating environment is essential to providing life-saving services such as E9-1-1 in dense urban environments where a single emergency event might trigger thousands of E9-1-1 calls.
The S5 Wireless system solution includes:
+ Inexpensive, low-power transmitting tags which implement a sophisticated signal structure based on modern communication theory
+ A highly scalable network of real-time base stations which receive and demodulate the RF transmissions generated by the tags
+ Location and telemetry servers which aggregate, assemble and process the information provided by the base stations in real-time to provide exact location and extract telemetry
+ An enterprise-class secure network operations center to monitor network status, authorize and service customer requests for location and telemetry information
In operation, each S5 location tag simply transmits upon a set schedule, and/or via "trigger" event. The S5 network captures each tag transmission, determines location coordinates and extracts telemetry data, if included. The resulting information is securely forwarded by the S5 network to authorized customers in less than 2 seconds.
