S5 Wireless set to deploy new wireless location infrastructure
A Utah start-up is ready to offer low-cost wireless chips and software that can fix locations faster and less expensively than GPS but just as accurately.
As two ex-3Com engineers in Salt Lake City were working on a breakthrough in wireless location tracking, 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart was kidnapped from her home nearby in June 2002.
The event underlined for Sy Prestwich and Scott Bevan the practical implications of their work to create a wireless infrastructure that was at least as accurate as GPS satellite fixes, but is faster, less expensive and much more pervasive, because it can work indoors.
Eight months later, in February 2003, the two men founded S5 Wireless, where Prestwich is chief scientist and Bevan is vice president of digital design. Smart was found unharmed the following month, in the home of her abductors, in nearby Sandy, Utah. Now, S5 is bringing that original research to market in the form of a radio chip packaged in base stations and client devices, and a hosted service that can feed accurate coordinates to an array of new location applications.
Company executives say the S5 base station radios and companion client chips work far faster than current GPS and other location technologies, with far more accuracy and far less power. These capabilities promise to make location and location-awareness a pervasive element in an increasingly mobile world. A trio of venture funds, Craig McCaw’s Eagle River Holdings, vSpring Capital and Wasatch Venture Fund, are betting a total of $20 million that S5 can deliver.
They’re not alone, as more vendors and carriers are experimenting with location technology. Sprint has announced expanded use of location technology, in part to simplify online searches by mobile phone users. Microsoft earlier this year lifted the lid on some of its own location research.
Several variables make current wireless nets unsuitable for accurate, cost-effective location tracking, according to David Carter, S5 CEO and president.
Applications as basic as 911 and as trendy as mobile social networking applications all require a fast “time to first fix” — the length of time needed to derive the location — and still more time to keep it up to date. A GPS satellite fix can take 20 seconds to two minutes. “For a lot of applications [such as 911], this isn’t fast enough,” Carter says. Another GPS problem is that it doesn’t fix indoor locations.
RFID, Zigbee and even Wi-Fi radios suffer from range limitations. They are proving themselves in short-range location applications but not over metropolitan areas. And large-scale deployments can be expensive.
What was needed was wide-area coverage, very low cost hardware, the ability to run years on a single battery, match GPS for accuracy, be highly reliable and work for telemetry applications.
The S5 “base station” is a rack-mounted device that can sit at existing cell-tower sites. At least three of the stations are needed to triangulate location in a given area, but they don’t need to be deployed as densely as cellular radios.
The client chip, embedded in a tag or directly into a cell phone, ID bracelet or other device, periodically and automatically wakes up and transmits in the 915MHz band its unique ID number in about 100 millisec. Then it hibernates until the next transmission. That burst is picked up by the listening, receive-only S5 base stations, time-stamped, and forwarded to S5’s network operations center, where the Location Telemetry Server calculates the XY coordinates of the client and feeds that information to public and private location and tracking applications. It can also extract telemetry data from the signal if included.
The burst signal, just a few hundred bits, is spread out by S5’s proprietary coding over a wide swath of the available spectrum, and then pulled together by silicon in the base station. That technique makes the process cost-effective and highly spectrally efficient, according to Carter. The result: the reported location will be within 9 meters 67% of the time for outdoors and within 14 meters for indoors, he says.
Those results were born out this past fall, when the entire system was tested in a pilot deployment in Salt Lake City. That accuracy is far greater than what is called for by the relevant FCC E911 rules.
The company’s L-Chip is a 5×5 millimeter device, smaller than a dime, with a price tag of less than one dollar, readily embedded into a wide range of devices. But it can transmit its signal through buildings, and over long distances. The chip will be available in several form factors for sampling by the end of 2007.
Carriers or service providers can install the S5 infrastructure with their existing cellular or broadband wireless towers. The rack-mounted base stations will be much less costly than conventional cellular base stations, according to Carter, by orders of magnitude.
S5 plans to license its technology to anyone who wants to include it in their own products, royalty free. “We don’t plan to make money on the device side,” Carter says. “We’ve told the device makers they can buy chips directly from our chip fabricator if they have enough volume.”
S5 plans to collect money from services. Carriers would buy the S5 base stations and then pay a fee to the company for traffic to those stations. For example, Verizon Wireless persuades Nokia to include the S5 chip in a new model handset. Subscribers with that handset might pay $1 a month for the location service. Some fraction of that will be shared by S5 with the carrier. The chip could be included in personal location devices, pet trackers, and asset tracking or telemetry services.
S5 is in talks with an array of providers and manufacturers. Carter says the first metropolitan deployments will begin in early 2008, but he declined to say where or with whom.
