All femtocells sold to date include a GPS receiver-and a 30-foot GPS antenna. "Whoever's operating that network has to have a license to operate a wireless network in that geographic location," Young explained, "So you have to check and make sure you're in an area that's covered by that license." Advertisementįurther, femtocells need to prevent their use outside a given country to avoid stepping on licenseholders there. Carriers in many nations have unique groups of spectrum licenses in each area they serve. A handset with a digital TV receiver could supplement GPS in the same way that WiFi is being used by Skyhook Wireless to provide location information in difficult locations for the iPhone and other smartphones.īut femtocells are the immediate target because femtocells have a location requirement for both operation and emergency calling in North America. A North American standard is moving towards adoption, too. The company is also looking at television viewed on mobile handsets, an already large and rapidly growing service in Japan and South Korea. (See " Study: consumers likely to greet femtocells with yawns," among other articles.) Todd Young, the company's vice president of marketing, told Ars that the company's focus is on bringing "timing and location to in-building and urban and even dense canopy areas in which GPS just doesn't work." That's a neat overlap with where cellular carriers are trying to place femtocells, compact cell base station intended to improve indoor coverage. Rosum is not a new firm, but the time may have arrived for its technology, which allows the company to provide either a GPS-like fix on a location by itself or to assist an inexpensive GPS module that is receiving extremely weak satellite data. Rosum's focus in the world of GPS is not to replace GPS-a system partly architected by one of the company's founders-but to supplement GPS in places where satellite signals can't be received, generally indoors, as well as urban canyons. Rosum would probably like to thank the television broadcasting industry for putting up fixed transmitters all over the world with accurate-enough timing information in publicly broadcast data to let the firm create GPS-like results without a satellite in sight.
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