S5 Wireless: Another potential competitor for GPS for asset tracking?

A Utah based company, S5 Wireless recently announced that they have successfully tested their new location awareness technology in Salt Lake City. The technology claims to be able to determine location within 14 meters indoors and 9 meters outdoors and to offer some interesting benefits over existing location awareness alternatives. Its important to note that the system seems more designed to track the whereabouts of something at a distance rather as a replacement to a GPS chip in say a navigation device where the user of the device wants to know his location right there on the device.

Since the transmitter just seems to burst out with its location every once in a while either on a set schedule or when poked to do so, there is less energy spent continually listening to the network for information. This process seems to be part of their secret sauce.

The system uses the familiar process of determining position by listening for a signal traveling out from the S5W chip/beacon device, on the public 915 Mhz frequency, to each of the base stations in and around the device and comparing the time of arrival at each of the 3 or more receivers in order to calculate position. They key to the technology seems to be the IP of being able to pick out the location signal from all the other noise at that frequency and also the very small footprint necessary for the chip.

It’s unclear beyond Salt Lake City how many S5W base stations have been deployed, but presumably further build out of the network is what the companies fund raising efforts have been earmarked for… if they’re able to get a national network up and running they could be on to something big.