June 21, 2005
WPS to replace GPS?
I’ve heard about it for a little while now but Skyhook
announced that their Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS) is commercially available as of Monday, 6/20.
They said they drove around all the major metropolitan areas to identify unique “identifiers” from routers broadcasting an 802.11 signal. I wonder what that could be. The only unique thing would be a MAC address (not alwys unique due to MAC cloning…especially due to Cable providers) or an IP address (available but dynamic IPs can cause issues and the assumption is that they’re unique…which means they must be public IP addresses). The SSID is not unique and can change even more often.
Skyhook says it is more accurate than GPS (and there is no cost for satellites).
In any case, they claim a developer can use their software, running on or accessed by an end-user’s laptop/wireless device, to check this database of access points to determine where they are. I’ve already mentioned how I think this information could be useful to geo-aware/geo-targetted apps. I just wonder how well it works (will only work “well” within major metros with lots of access points) and how, specifically it works.
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Emad Fanous » Blog Archive » MSN Virtual Earth Launches said,
July 25, 2005 @ 6:17 am
[…] Perhaps they are using WMS to identify where the users are but are they requiring a downloadable application and, if so, is it for Windows only? […]
Emad Fanous » Blog Archive » Speculation: GoogleNet = Free WiFi for everyone said,
August 15, 2005 @ 8:28 am
[…] Well, if they will be providing a wifi network, anybody on it could get a page they provide as the default page, which would help push their content and their advertisers (especially local content and ads since they would know exactly where users are accessing the wifi from and wouldn’t have to guess using other technology…pretty powerful uses for them. […]