International Wireless
Communications Expo 2000

Las Vegas, Nevada
March 22-24

by Gary Allen

Conditions were perfect for this year's IWCE 2000--it was in the mid-70s during the entire three-day event, and the smell of freshly-baked pizza waffed through the convention center because Pizza Expo was being held in an adjacent exhibition hall. The show also offered its first public safety track of education seminars that included sessions on trunked radio systems, the global positioning system (GPS) and the evolution of public safety radio gear.

All the major vendors were present, including the newly-forged Comm-Net Ericsson Critical Communications company. The vendors hawked end-to-end solutions for the business and consumer radio segments of the market: portable and base station radios, headsets, consoles, towers and siting services, antennas, RF test gear, radio batteries and cases, RF coordination and coverage services. Virtually every part of the spectrum was represented by at least one vendor, including conventional VHF/UHF, the FRS allocations, trunked 800 MHz, microwave, and the satellite bands.

The interesting part of the radio displays was that many of the models marketed to public safety and displayed at their annual trade shows were missing. Instead, radio equipment companies were showing their alternate-tier equipment, which is usually less expensive and less rugged. Nevertheless, the trade exhibits provided some insights into the complexity and breath of radio systems, and the educational sessions provided a look at the future of public safety communications.

Evolution of Public Safety Communications

Project 25--much has been written and spoken about it, but past-president of the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials (APCO) Craig Jorgensen explained that Project 34 is just as important. It was formed to devise a standard for high-speed, wide-band digital data for public safety applications by law enforcement, fire, EMS and other governmental agencies.

"It's an evolutionary process," Jorgensen said, that's being prepared in concert with several other organizations, including some in Europe. He said many elements must come together for the project to succeed, including "profit" for the equipment manufacturers, which he said it always difficult to fit in. When it's finished, the data standard will over 600 million people, Jorgensen said.

"We recognize that we're dealing with divergent standards already." He listed Open Sky, EDACS, TETRA and Project 25. "And there will always be divergent ways to do your business," he told the IWCE attendees. But he said the standards we have today, and that we develop in the future don't replace planning.

He observed that our world is expanding and not contracting. Contrary to past experience, someone else's problem is our problem, he said, and crime can't be isolated by country. Jorgensen said the Project 34 committee recognized it needed international cooperation. He opined that most of the commercial participation is European, because the companies there realize the problem of the transient criminal, moving across political boundaries.

What does HSD mean to Americans? Jorgensen listed high capacity, multi-bands of information, video, voice, data, bandwidth on demand, which will all have to be managed and standardized. In addition, the bandwidth must be supported by the telephone network and standardized interfaces.

Jorgensen said the final standard will be based on equality for both the small and large user. It will be a universal standard for any country, any urban or metropolitan area, any type of agency (fire, law enforcement, EMS), for any type of data required by the agency (iris scans, fingerprints, video from patrol car, fire truck or helicopter, to comm center or hospital). It will be capable of carrying digitized voice, but that's not the purpose, he explained.

"The door will be open for the private sector to come in and say, 'I want to participate,'" he said.

He asked the audience for show of hands on how many were involved in public safety---most raised their hands. He reminded then how difficult it is to wait for a vehicle registration or warrant check. "This standard is to make sure that when your officer in the field pushes the button, he or she is going to get a response," Jorgensen said.

He said the standard will support full motion video and still photos. "We expect the standard to be able to do that." However, the full motion video won't be 2.5 Mbps full-bandwidth, but more like 386 Kbps, he said. It will include 10-point fingerprints or iris scans, which aren't usually used in law enforcement now. The standard will also support other agencies that perform public safety tasks, such as transportation, automated freeways, other governmental agencies.

"We have to find a way to make sure whatever we do provides you a migration path from where you are, to where you want to be," Jorgensen said. He assured the group that the final standard will do this. "You won't have to toss out your current CAD," he said.

Jorgensen said the potential impact of the process will insure the cost per mobile unit will be competitive. "The infrastructure cost of the project will be significant," he said. "Your agency cannot afford to purchase this network, but everyone should be able to afford to hook up to it." He said the committee is striving for economies of scale to lower costs, and added, "There's nothing in this standards process will preclude this being a joint public-private system or venture."

"The public safety community as a whole has lost a lot of flexibility on the individual operator level because we've been so dependent upon voice communications," he said. We must make sure that law enforcement, fire and EMS have access to every component of data that they have access to on a desktop now, and more. We make to ensure that that person in the field is totally wired for complete support, so his or her office moves with them."

He said Project 34 will be "standards through cooperation." He said the TIA will have symposium in Washington (DC) later this year to discuss the process and how you can become involved. "I would encourage you to think about your dreams of taking care of the people you serve," both field personnel and citizens.

He concluded by telling the IWCE attendees that the Project's statement of requirements is the Internet in Acrobat (pdf) format at:

www.apcointl.org/project25/p34SOR40Clean.pdf

"I encourage you to participate," Jorgensen said. "Whether you agree or disagree is not important. The important part is that we hear from you."

Enhanced GPS For Public Safety

In another educational session John Cunningham, who manages public image and marketing programs for SnapTrack, explained his company's enhanced wireless location product based on the global positioning system (GPS) of satellites.

Cunningham said SnapTrack was founded in 1995 and developed a new method of increasing the speed and accuracy of GPS location fixes. Until recently, SnapTrack was a relatively small company with 70 employees, but was purchased in early March by telecom giant Qualcomm for $1 billion in stock, an action that will ultimately play a key part in distributing the technology to America's wireless phone users.

Cunningham said wireless 911 wasn't a big issue in the early 1990's, but then the wireless boom hit. He said now there are some 100,000 wireless made to 911 each day in the U.S., and on average 30-40% of those callers don't know where they are. What's more, Cunningham said a survey showed that 75% of Americans mistakenly believe that wireless 911 calls display a location to the dispatcher just like wired calls.

He said there was some initial regulatory debate over the direction of the technology choice for locating. "The FCC inadvertently choose network-based overlay technology for doing location of mobile phones and mobile devices," he said. "Well, they didn't anticipate the rapid movement in the mobile-based technology area, which is not using the network itself to locate cell phones or other wireless devices, but using the device itself to the location, or an assisted location."

After meetings, the FCC decided to allow a handset or client-based location solution. "So, with that ruling, it really spurred a lot of activity in the mobile wireless location industry," Cunningham said.

Wireless locating isn't a very friendly environment, he explained. A caller could be inside a building, standing on a street corner surrounded by tall buldings, or otherwise be blocked from providing or receiving a good signal. The location technology must provide a quick and accurate fix, be easy to integrate into existing handsets, and have a low cost. "That's kind of a tough range of things to answer to," he said.

Further, GPS is difficult to use in urban environments, and it doesn't work at all indoors, where reception of the satellites' signals is blocked. Understanding that, but still wanting to capitalize on the GPS system that's everywhere, SnapTrack developed wireless assisted GPS. "That's essentially a client-server architecture that takes all the computation 'umph' out of the client, if you will, and puts it onto a network," Cunningham said.

Consumer portable GPS units typically do all the computations inside the wireless device, Cunningham said, burning up battery power and slowing down processing. SnapTrack's approach, "Lets us take advantage of advances in telecommunications and computing technology, and do a client-server architecture, where most of the heavy lifting for calculation work is done off line, in a server." He said the technique can also correct the GPS information from multi-path errors, the Doppler effect, time of day, and increase sensitivity.

Cunningham said SnapTrack's assisted GPS solution is more accurate than conventional GPS in most situations. He said the server-side computer knows where the unit is generally--a law enforcement unit would be within a specific city or county limits. This helps to provide a quicker and more accurate fix. The server also has access to other GPS reference info. So rather than searching for all 24 satellites in the GPS constellation, the system knows what satellites are "visible" to the mobile unit based on the time of day, satellite availability and other data. Again, Cunningham said, this speeds up the access time.

This approach to mobile locating is also much more sensitive than conventional GPS, he said, allowing locations to be obtained even indoors or under other adverse conditions (he mentioned when a unit is under or covered with water, such as firefighting, where signals would typically be attenuated). "Some of the advantage of this system is that we actually do get some coverage indoors." He said fixes can be perform down to -155 db signal.

Once the fix is made, the location information is available not only to the mobile unit and dispatcher, but to any other system on the network.

Cunningham said a typical average accuracy using assisted GPS is five to 20 meters. For vehicle fixes, the average accuracy is 12 to 15 meters, in open sky is three to four meters, and inside a wood-frame house it's 20 meters.

He said the technology works with any air interface, including CDMA, TDMA, pagers and two-way radios. Since it's a software solution, it can be incorporated into almost any form factor, and even placed on a single semiconductor chip. Right now, he said, the cost of the unit-on-a-chip in bulk quantities is $10 per unit.

An audience member asked a question that led to a key commitment--how long it would take to deploy this solution, based on the rate of wireless telephone handset churn? Cunningham said the current churn rate in the U.S. is 18 to 24 months, but that Europe experiences a much shorter rate.

Cunningham said Qualcomm has decided to incorporate SnapTrack's technology into their CDMA chipset. "They're combining our technology with their own GPS hybrid solution," he said, "so it'll become a standard feature in all CDMA chipsets from Qualcomm going forward." He aid Qualcomm has also established relationships with Intel, Motorola and Texas Intruments. "So, we expect that over the next 18 to 24 months, most new cell phones in CDMA with start coming out with this capability inside." He estimated that it would take three to five years to replace today's CDMA phones with assisted-GPS models, and less if America's churn rate shortens.

He surmised that as soon as one carrier adopted a location technology--which they're required to do this October--then all the other carriers would quickly fall into line.

Cunningham said SnapTrack has performed tests of the technology with several domestic and foreign carriers, and has experienced great success. He said the system is now being used in Japan in a personal digital assistant (PDA) application--users can sign up for a "Friend Finder" service that alerts the PDA owner when a "buddy" comes within a certain distance of the owner (18 meter average accuracy). It's been tested in Spain using ATM, restaurant and other point of interest location services from a vehicle.

He said other commercial applications are waiting in the horizon, including child and asset tracking (clip a pager-like device to the child's backpack), Web access to tracking information and more. He said Microsoft has agreed to integrate the technology into their Mobile Explorer platform for smart wireless phones and PDAs.

Cunningham said SnapTrack's assisted-GPS chips will be available to integrators in July or August, and he expects handsets equipped with the new chips to be available in the first quarter of 2001.

Explanation of SnapTrack technology (Acrobat-pdf format, 1.1 Mb)
SnapTrack Web site
Qualcomm Web site

updated 4-8-2000

First look at Comm-Net Ericsson Critical Communications booth

E.F. Johnson