Seeker Wireless enhances 'home zone' mobile technology

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 22 September 2009 16:13

IT Industry - Strategy

For years mobile operators have dabbled with "home zone" technologies that enable them to apply a reduced tariff when a mobile is operating in its home zone, and thus compete with fixed line offerings. These have had limitations but Australian company Seeker Wireless reckons it has the problem licked with the latest release of its SeekerZone technology.

The biggest challenge for home zone systems is to be able to accurately and reliably define a sufficiently small zone so that users do not enjoy the reduced home zone tariff over a wide area, cannibalising operators' mobile revenue stream.

According to Seeker Wireless' CTO, Dr Malcolm Macnaughtan, "In the past, many operators have not been able to deploy quality Home Zone services, because the first generation of Home Zone systems were plagued by large zone sizes and unreliable billing, resulting in a high level of customer complaints."
A decade ago in Australia Hutchison Telecom, then branded Orange, launched its CDMA network with the home zone as its central feature, but was forced to quietly discontinue this and offer a standard mobile service because of problems with zone definition. Since then Vodafone has rolled out a Home Zone service in a number of markets, including New Zealand using Seeker Wireless technology.


With the latest release, the 'General Availability' of SeekerZone, Seeker Wireless claims to have greatly increased the accuracy with which zones can be defined, and to have developed a version that requires no special functionality on the handset, relying solely on a central server.

The SeekerZone General Availability release is claimed to enable 35 percent smaller zone sizes than earlier releases, and a unique feature enabling average reliability and zone size to be adjusted in steps as small as one percent. "Operators can now launch successful Home Zone services without the previous headaches of large revenue cannibalisation, subscriber complaints, and costly investments in network planning tools," Seeker Wireless says.

The SeekerZone technology uses a small applet on the SIM card that monitors signal strength from nearby base stations and uses this to calculate the position of the handset.

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