Seeker Wireless fixed mobile convergence breakthrough

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 03 October 2006 10:25

Business IT - Technology

The Seeker approach has received a strong endorsement from market research company Ovum. In an independent review of the technology, senior analyst, Carrie Pawsey, wrote: "We are impressed with the Seeker solution and the story it is presenting to mobile operators. If the homezone technology solution is able to deliver on the promises made, then we expect to see a lot of interest from mobile operators.

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"This solution enables the mobile operators to compete against the FMC  solutions being offered by the integrated and fixed operators. There is less upfront investment required than when implementing unlicensed mobile access (UMA) or other FMC solutions. As the solution is based on the SIM card there is no new equipment for the operator to subsidise and the homezone service is compliant with almost all existing handsets in the customer base (It is able to run on any handsets up to six years old)."

Ovum did express reservations about Seeker's ability, with only 20 employees, to meet any significant demand, and noted also that the scalability of the technology remained untested.

Seeker Wireless is privately funded and has received investments totally about  $7.8 million  to date. Its CEO is Dr Chris Drane, former vice president of UK-based mobile position technology specialist, Cambridge Positioning Systems (CPS). Its roots, however, are firmly Australian: it had its origins in the University of Technology, Sydney.

In 2000 CPS acquired patents from and recruited two members of a UTS research team, headed by Drane, that claimed to have been one of the first in the world to demonstrate accurate location in GSM networks. The two team members moved to the UK. UTS's commercial arm, Insearch Technology Development, took an equity stake in CPS as part of this deal. A year later CPS set up an R&D unit in Sydney, to be headed by Drane then a professor in the of the Faculty of Engineering at UTS.

The CPS solution at that time relied on triangulating the location of the handset from nearby base stations by observing the difference in signal transit times between the handset and the base stations. This could, potentially give a highly accurate location but is much more technically complex that the Seeker solution: the location cannot be determined by the handset alone.