GeoWorld: Can you tell us a little bit about TeleCommunication Systems and its background?

Lorello: TCS is a data communications company that’s 22 years old -- that makes us the same age as GeoWorld from what I understand. And our company is a data communications company that really started as a federal systems integrator, but rapidly moved into other data communications systems and primarily moved into the wireless space. So, in government, we do satellite communications, a pretty broad range of products under the SwiftLink brand name.

And then we moved into the commercial space a little more than a decade ago, where we focused on wireless location and messaging technology and data communications in the wireless cellular space.

We were one of the first to introduce the use of location technology to support wireless 9-1-1. As you may recall, the 9-1-1 space has been primarily focused on a landline infrastructure. So when those pesky mobile phones started showing up, the ability to take a phone number and look it up in the database to include a street address so you can dispatch somebody to go send help no longer worked--it was broken.

TCS acquired a company in the early 2000 timeframe, and we pioneered the way in which a wireless phone could be located and its location information could be delivered to public safety in real time to make it look like it was a wireline phone in a sense. So ultimately, the 6,500 PSAPs out there, Public Safety Answering Points, did not have to change the way they operated to be able to handle a wireless 9-1-1 call.

So it was a major pioneering effort that actually kicked off the whole concept of a wireless 9-1-1 call, which more than half of all the 9-1-1 calls dialed today are wireless calls. And of those, TCS has approximately half of all those wireless 9-1-1 calls.

And so we use geospatial information significantly. Of the 6,500 call centers that you have to route a call to, figuring out which one it is, is a geospatial question. Where does the boundary map for that PSAP lie? Where the caller is calling from, what boundary do they fall into?

How do you route the call to that particular PSAP and get the location information to that PSAP in real time so that for the callers taking the call, the caller’s location pops up on the screen at the time the call comes in.

These are all things that we had to figure out; we solved them using different types of geospatial engines. We acquired a geospatial engine back in 2007, when we acquired Kivera, which was doing applications for the commercial space. We took that same geospatial engine and applied it to use in 9-1-1 calls as well as commercial applications. So we’ve been active in the geospatial arena.

GeoWorld: As TCS was acquiring Kivera, was the goal to do something like this, or did TCS realize the capabilities after the fact?

Lorello: Actually, our focus was on location technologies. We’re a data communications company; we were in the wireless space doing messaging at the time. We were one of the first companies to introduce a real messaging solution for text messaging We saw that this text messaging craze would come -- last year we sent 260 billion text messages via our technologies that have been deployed in various carrier networks here in the United States.

So we’re active in the text-messaging arena, but we were looking for what would be the next data use in the country, and we really felt that location was key. We saw text messaging eventually evolving into multimedia messaging; we felt that to really get a person to look at their screen from a multimedia perspective, one of the things we thought would be compelling would be to deliver a map to the screen, saying here’s where this person is located -- with a “you are here dot on the map,” and then basically show them whatever the points of interest were -- if they needed to navigate from point A to point B, how to get there.

Just so many different things we thought could come from a location technology. So we acquired Xypoint to focus on location technologies; they were very prevalent in the 9-1-1 space at the time. We beefed up the technology and the data centers and the network operations center that support 9-1-1 across the country, and in the process realized that this mapping was an important element.

When we acquired Kivera, our focus was to build applications for handsets, because we felt this was the next wave of this location ecosystem that we needed to have to make it easy for the carrier to move forward for location technology.

So we had a fantastic geospatial engine, and we incorporated it in, so the geospatial engines were key elements of what we acquired. We capitalized user-engineering prowess to capitalize on them and use them in more creative and interesting ways to make our offerings more effective. As a result, I think it’s fair to say that the geospatial engines are core capability that we offer today in what we do in location.

GeoWorld: So how does wireless location for 9-1-1 work?

Lorello: So you dial 9-1-1 [from a mobile phone], but the call center doesn’t know where to route. The first step is to figure out where do you send that call? There’s 6,500 Public Safety Answering Points out there, so which one of those centers has to receive that call?

We effectively get what’s called a trigger from the wireless switch that tells us where the caller is calling from, and we use that information to determine which PSAP to route the call.

So that gets the call on its way, but then we go a step further, because many of these PSAPs -- I think it’s over 93 percent of the PSAPs out -- are capable to receive not just the cell-phone sector information, but a precise location: an XY coordinate, that has to be somewhere between 50 and 150 meters in accuracy about 67 percent of the time. That’s the goal the FCC has set for the public-safety industry and wireless carriers in particular.

So we have to extract location information in real time from the network, getting that location fixed as precise a level as we can. Then, when the call goes into the Public Safety Answering Point that we’ve already steered toward them, they have the ability to take the phone number and use it to do a database lookup to find a street address.

We created a spoofing approach that would essentially replace the phone number with a pseudo Automatic Numbering Identity -- it’s like your caller ID. It does two functions; first, it makes it look like it’s a local call. So if I live here in Maryland; if I go into DC, my 410 area code is not going to be a number that the DC call center thinks it can look up in its DC database, right? It’s going to be looking for a 202 area code, and as a result it’s going to fail.

So calls that came in with a 410 number would be blocked, so it was important to replace the number so that it would look like a local DC number. What happened is the PSAP, when they get that calling number, they then use that number to look it up on a database, and that database is typically managed by the local exchange carrier, so they would send a message to the local exchange carrier saying “here’s the phone number, please give me the street address back.”

We worked with the local exchange carriers around the country to say that if a number comes in and it’s one of these types of numbers, these pseudo numbers, we want you to ask us for the location information, and we will present it to you, and then you can present it back to the Public Safety Answering Point.

So in the first stages, where they were looking for a street address, we would send them back the street address of the cell site, sector of the cell tower, but later, as the PSAPs upgraded to be able to handle an XY coordinate, they would expect an XY coordinate.

As a result, the call taker, when the call comes in and it’s ringing, they’ll see a screen pop up with a map and a dot on that map and usually a little circle around that dot to indicate how accurate the location of that particular caller might be. That way they know how to dispatch and help to that person as they’re calling in real time.

GeoWorld: So the person answering the call, they know that it’s a wireless number coming through? That comes to them certainly differently than a landline call?

Lorello: Yes, they’re coming with a specific class of service that identifies it as either a Phase 0, Phase I and Phase II wireless call, where Phase 0 is a default call, if location information for some reason is not available. It’s a fallback strategy in case the location technology should fail.

Obviously it doesn’t happen often, but you always have to have a fall back one for that. A Phase I indicates that it’s a cellular call, and it has a cell-site sector information only available, and a Phase II call indicates that an XY coordinate is available and therefore should be able to be presented as an XY coordinate onscreen.

GeoWorld: What does a landline call come through as?

Lorello: A landline. It comes in as a wireline call.

GeoWorld: So that comes in separately?

Lorello: Correct. And we’ve also identified Voice over IP class of service as well -- that’s one of the things that we also pioneered. We took the same concept of what we’ve done for wireless and recognized that the Voice over IP world was also going to the point where you can unplug your phone and plug it in somewhere else and make calls from that new location, which sounded a lot like wireless to us.

So we presented that concept to the FCC – they agreed and in fact they even mandated a solution that looked much like what we presented to them as a potential solution for the Voice over IP world, which they were concerned about back in 2005. They came out with an order requiring the Voice over IP providers to provide a similar type of service, and, as a result, we’ve been providing a majority of the Voice over IP calls.

GeoWorld: Could you a little bit describe how you go about determining those XY location?

Lorello: It’s a two-stage process. The first step is to find out where the cell-phone sector is. They get that information straight from the switch.

GeoWorld: And that’s just where the particular cell tower is?

Lorello: Exactly, and the sector of that tower. Any time you make a phone call on a wireless network, the wireless network knows which cell tower is providing you service, and they just present that information to us. So that’s the first phase in what we call Phase I data.

But then we need to get that precise location, and there are two technologies deployed in the United States that do that today. One is a network-based technology, which typically uses triangulation technologies that have been added to the cell towers.

Those technologies usually provide a location somewhere between 100 meters and 300 meters of accuracy, that’s the expected FCC range of capability.

What we’ve found to be more precise and probably the way the industry is going to go is the handset-based technology many of us are now familiar with, which is a GPS receiver inside the handset.

And that GPS can locate a caller -- especially in an outdoor setting -- to within five-meter accuracy. So in that situation, we extract information from a system called a position-determination entity, which uses some complex algorithms to calculate the location based on satellite information -- the satellite constellation and the way it interacts with the information on the phone.

One of the things that we have to do in that satellite solution, though, is we have to provide what’s called assistance data to make an assisted GPS fix, because GPS technology can be a real power drain on a phone battery. So if you left the GPS turned order to be able to find that phone at any particular time, the phone battery life would be severely diminished, so this is a real problem.

And they had a choice; they could either wait up to three minutes to get a location fix or they could drain the GPS chip on all the time and drain the battery. So neither solution was one that they wanted, and the industry came up with a technique called assisted data or assisted GPS. The phone, when it’s awakened to get a GPS location fix, it then turns on the GPS chip and asks for information about where the satellites are.

We maintain the data for the GPS handsets here in the United States that would help them provide that assistance information; allow them to rapidly find the satellite constellation that they care about, get the satellite information from those constellations and then rapidly calculate a solution. Instead of taking up to three minutes, it’s now a 12-second type of time range in which it takes to get the location information on the first fix.

That’s about the same time it takes to route the call, so it ends up getting to the Public Safety Answering Point very close to the time when the call taker takes the call, and the call taker has the ability to do what’s called a re-bid. They can press a button and say “give me a new fix on this phone.”

GeoWorld: Is it done automatically?

Lorello: The technology is set up so that when you dial 9-1-1, the phone put in a receptive state, if you will. We send a message to the phone saying “wake up, get your GPS chip going, and give us a location.”

The phone gathers its information from the satellite and sends a message back in response to our PDE that then takes the number and figures out a precise XY coordinate.

GeoWorld: It’s been said that the industry isn’t wireless 9-1-1 ready and that it needs to do things to become ready. What are those things?

Lorello: Actually, the industry is very wireless 9-1-1 ready -- the challenge is we’re entering into what we call the next-generation technology, and that’s where the industry has a long ways to go.

As of July 2009, 96.2 percent of the PSAPs have what’s called Phase I capability, which is cell-site sector. 93 percent have Phase II, so 93 percent of the call centers out there can take an XY coordinate and print it on a map. That’s pretty good, actually. The challenge is that they’re not ready for the next wave;

For example, let’s say you’re out there walking down the street, and you see somebody being mugged across the street. You could take a picture of that happening in real time, and what do you do with it? The police don’t have a way to receive it. You don’t have a way to send that picture that could actually help catch the perpetrator later, as there’s no place to send it.

So that’s an example of a new data technology that we have available to us that we can’t use. We don’t have a data ready 9-1-1 system in the United States. It’s all focused on voice. We believe that with bringing the location technology that we’ve brought to the table, we can bring other types of data, like text messaging, picture messaging, video. People who are deaf and hard of hearing area would love to be able to add video messaging and video conferencing to be able to use sign language and communicate that way.

Those technologies are there, but the public-safety arena doesn’t have them yet. So we’re hoping new technology investments could be used by Public Safety Answering Points to help upgrade their solutions for the next-gen 9-1-1 standards, and ultimately be able to handle data -- not just voice but data solutions -- that come into their centers. As a vendor and player who works with wireless carriers, we’re able to help them provide that information.

GeoWorld: So the PSAPs just need hardware upgrades on their end?

Lorello: That’s part of it, and the infrastructure has to upgrade to some extent. There has to be a way to take that 9-1-1 text message or picture message and deliver it to the appropriate PSAP.

GeoWorld: How do you get a location from a text message? You said it takes eight to 12 seconds, but a text message is almost instantaneous.

Lorello: When you dial 9-1-1, the phone gets in a location-ready state, and then we send it a message saying hey, here’s your assistance information. Go get your satellites; go get your location fix, and then send the information back to us and we’ll approach it.

GeoWorld: So the phone behaves differently just by pressing 9-1-1?

Lorello: Exactly. And there are many phones coming out today that could handle that for text messaging as well. There’s a new technology that the cellular industry is now supporting called network-initiated location.

In fact, we have an application at Sprint called Mobile Locator, where a mom-and-pop shop or a small- to medium-sized business could have a fleet of trucks that could pull up a Web site and effectively know where their trucks are located. And that information is derived from the fact that that Web site, when it pops up on the screen, sends messages to those trucks asking to provide location information back to the center so it can then display it. That’s very much like what would happen with a 9-1-1 text message or picture message scenario.

GeoWorld: Do you use any traditional types of spatial technology?

Lorello: Absolutely, the core to making these technologies work is the maps. Even for 9-1-1, when you have 6,500 call centers out there, you have to know where they are, you have to know what coverage space they have. Therefore, you have to know which calls go to which call centers.

The one way you can do that is with a really good mapping technology, and we’ve developed some of the best. It’s got some great fuzzy logic that works with it, especially for Voice over IP, where you have a person that’s registered to a street address that could be anywhere in the country, and you have to know where it’s going -- which of those 6,500 call centers it’s going to map to.