Cell phones are growing smarter all the time, and Bell Labs wants to make them smarter about where cell phone calls are originating.
Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs unwrapped a technology Wednesday the company claims will allow mobile-phone companies to pinpoint a caller's location to within 15 linear feet.
The company said the technology will be useful for locating 911 callers in distress. User location could also be used to provide driving directions and local traffic information.
Bell Labs said the technology is accurate within 15 linear feet when users are outdoors and within 100 linear feet when they are indoors. A linear foot roughly indicates the radius of a circle within which the phone is located.
Cellular providers can currently derive location information by triangulating the location of the base station and antenna nearest to the caller. According to Bell Labs researcher Giovanni Vannucci, that method can only get a fix on someone within a few thousand square feet, or up to six square miles in rural areas.
Bell Labs researchers improved on the method using Global Positioning System (GPS) technology. Other GPS technologies exist for locating cell calls, but, Vannucci said, "Our technology achieves substantial improvements."
The technique places high-powered GPS receiver units throughout a wireless network. The stations transmit key information, including estimated time of the signal's arrival at the satellite, to nearby wireless handsets.
Carriers can equip new handsets with scaled-down GPS units. Bell Labs discovered that it was possible to offload time-difference calculations from the phones into the GSP base stations.
According to Bell Labs, the technology will allow cellular network operators to easily meet a October 2001 Federal Communications Commission mandate requiring that all cell phones be able to locate 911 dialers.
The company is pursuing standardization of its geolocation technology as a cellular industry standard.
David Sobel, general counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, outlined the privacy concerns over location technology in general.
"We are very concerned about the deployment and requirement of location-tracking information in the cellular networks," Sobel said.
"The concern is that, once the capability is developed and the architecture for location tracking is in place, it will be very difficult to restrict use of that capability only to emergency situations."
Sobel said that once the capability exists, cell-phone firms will face pressure from both commercial industry and from the government to routinely track location and record the whereabouts of people when they use their cell phones.
With significant privacy issues involved, Sobel said any wide deployment should come with strict guidelines for the circumstances under which the capability can be used.
