GPS is coming into your GSM

Basics | Benefits | Services | For Whom? | Limitations | Summary | Links | Authors of this site

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Who will use it and for what price?

These question have a simple answers: EVERYONE and VERY LOW. There are very good reasons for these answers. Both GPS and mobile technologies are available already now for very low price and are used extensively. Moreover there are already mobile phones combining these two technologies.

GPS is a public service, which is free of charge. When GPS is combined with the mobile phone the GPS itself should not increase the price of the phone. Only price of the receiver itself will have to be added. Recently the price of simple GPS receiver ranges from 100 to 1000 FIM. Problem is not to add the hardware but to add corresponding services (which are discussed here) which will probably need higher bandwidth (like interactive map etc.) and more sophisticated software. This will be the main contributor of the price of not the mobile phone itself but the usage. It is very questionable what could be the price of such a service. From the recent days we can take an example of the WAP services, which are quite expensive (probably the GSM services will run over WAP as well). However the first GPS - GSM phones will definitely not be that cheap at all. At the beginning the price of the GPS services will unfortunately be very high limiting the type of users only to professionals.

So who will actually be the first ones to use the GPS services on a mobile phone? Seems reasonable to mention the people who have a job which requires a lot of traveling. These may be consultants, agents, journalists, truck drivers, police etc. The use of the GPS probably would not be to locate themselves, because they have got lost, but to locate somebody else, to show fastest route to the destination or to point out the place of interest. The other point of would be that the central control would know exact position of own people. But why would not they use a separate commercial GPS receiver? There could be many reasons like: to have only one multifunction device, to get the advantage of a mobile connection, etc. The things will probably go slowly at the beginning because the services are not defined and it is a very uneasy job to do. As a conclusion we would like to say, that GPS would be a nice value added service to the mobile communication. The future will show how usable it actually will be.

 

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Basics | Benefits | Services | For Whom? | Limitations | Summary | Links | Authors of this site