The location-services market is expanding quickly. Location-based technologies are finding their way into an increasing number of consumer products. These products, in turn, nurture services like location-sensitive billing and corporate-asset tracking and coordination. Meanwhile, consumers are welcoming services like "friend finders," personal navigation, and location-enabled entertainment. To keep up with this trend, SnapTrack (www.snaptrack.com) and Marconi's Wireless Business Unit (www.marconi.com) are creating an improved method for deploying and maintaining hybrid Assisted Global Positioning System (A-GPS) location systems.

The companies forged an agreement to cooperate in the development of an enhancement to Marconi's Planet EV tool. They are going to empower Planet EV with its newest module, the Base Station Almanac (BSA) Planner. For QUALCOMM's gpsOne hybrid A-GPS location systems, this module promises to make deployment and maintenance processes more accurate and efficient. It also plans to optimize the system's overall performance and accuracy.

The BSA Planner solution automatically generates a Base Station Almanac. It then maintains and updates that almanac by incorporating information from Planet EV as well as other carrier-network-planning and maintenance tools and resources. With this version, operators should be able to obtain real-time performance information from Mobile Switching Centers (MSCs). This data helps to synchronize the BSA with network-configuration information as it changes.

The new tool also plans to improve the hybrid aspects of gpsOne performance. When calculating a mobile device's position, it will provide accurate, up-to-date network-configuration, base-station-geometry, and RF-environment information to SnapTrack's SnapSmart Position Determination Equipment (PDE). With gpsOne getting a boost from Marconi's Planet EV, the industry can anticipate quite an improvement in the deployment and maintenance of A-GPS systems.