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Until now, mobile-phone tracking services have not been seen much because they require expensive upgrades to operator networks.

The US Federal Communications Commission mandates of 1996 and 1999 – requiring wireless phones to be able to indicate their position during emergency calls – however forced operators to implement such upgrades. Since then, they have been looking for ways to recoup that investment.

Two major US mobile companies, Sprint Nextel and Verizon Wireless, both launched family-finding services in 2006 as a way of doing just that. This was the first time any of the US “big four” had offered GPS (Global Positioning System) location-tracking services exclusively for the consumer segment. Years ago, Nextel, now part of Sprint, began offering location-based services, but those have been aimed primarily at business consumers.

Sprint Nextel launched its family-location service under the brand Sprint Family Locator in April, with Verizon Wireless following suit in June with its Chaperone service. The other two big four operators, Cingular Wireless and T-Mobile, have yet to jump on the trend, which started in Japan with parents attaching transmitters to their child’s school backpack.

Mobile positioning key to tracking
Ericsson’s technology for LBS – which enables the same kind of family-location services as those offered by Sprint Nextel and Verizon Wireless – is the Mobile Positioning System (MPS). The system enables mobile phones to identify where they are through various types of positioning methods based on radio network measurements as well as using GPS satellites.

Ola Svensson, sales manager for Ericsson’s LBS solution, says: “Ericsson offers operators a turnkey solution supporting these standard methods for positioning (such as A-GPS, Cell ID, CGI/TA, E-CGI and U-TDOA) at the system level, all the way to the actual family-location services themselves, through partners. For those operators that do not want to run the service themselves, Ericsson can also offer these solutions as a hosted service.”

Barry McInerney, LBS applications portfolio manager at Ericsson, says Ericsson works with several partners to develop, test, integrate and provide Ericsson customers with proven, commercial family-location services.

One such partner, WaveMarket, has been very successful in the US and is the location-based application service provider behind Sprint’s Family Locator.

Tasso Roumeliotis, CEO of WaveMarket, says: “We are seeing huge demand in the US and abroad for family-location services as people yearn for private and safe ways to stay connected to their loved ones in this busy world.”

McInerney says that child tracking is one of two LBS applications most likely to be adopted by mobile operators and Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs) industry wide, the other is mobile navigation.

“Many of Ericsson’s customers are showing a keen interest in location-based family-finding services, and Ericsson is working with a portfolio of LBS partners to launch family-location services with customers worldwide in GSM and WCDMA markets,” McInerney says.

Ericsson has a world-leading 40 percent market share of deployed mobile-positioning systems (MPSs) and location-based services solutions worldwide. It already has more than 60 commercial MPS contracts in place for GSM and WCDMA.

Critics say that electronic spying could lead to unhealthy and damaging relationships between parents and children, but operators are offering parental consumers the chance to improve bonds by allowing parents to check on their children without having to nag, and to find them if they need to. “Families are buying peace of mind when they buy family-location services,” McInerney says.

GPS location-tracking services, also known as location-based services (LBS), are nothing new. They were initially developed for the US military and have previously been marketed with minor success to businesses.

The family-location services currently available all use the same basic technology. Sprint Family Locator and Verizon Wireless Chaperone are CDMA-based and both let concerned parents pinpoint on a computer or mobile-phone map within a few hundred meters where their children are at any given time.

The Verizon Wireless service allows parents to receive alerts whenever a child enters or exits a designated geographic area through what is known as “geofencing,” an electronically established boundary.