Wi-Fi Location Services Vie With GPS For DevelopersWi-Fi Location Services Vie With GPS For Developers

Global positioning systems are getting some competition and mobile phone developer networks may feel the heat, too, from Skyhook Wireless' Developer's Network.

The 3-year-old wireless company aims to woo developers of location-based services with free access to its metro-area positioning system, which relies on Wi-Fi signals rather than GPS signals to pinpoint a user's location.

Skyhook Wireless' Wi-Fi Position System takes advantage of the ubiquity of Wi-Fi access points in urban areas and is able to compute the location of a Wi-Fi-enabled mobile device in less than a second. "WPS has no line-of-sight requirements, is accurate to within 20 meters, and can be used indoors or outdoors to determine location in seconds," the company says.

WPS is active in the top 100 U.S. metropolitan areas, and Skyhook expects its coverage to reach 70% of the U.S. population by the end the year.

Skyhook doesn't require specialized GPS hardware, which saves money, CEO Ted Morgan says. "When you've got a device maker that's putting out a new phone or new PDA, they have to justify every penny that goes into that device," he says. "Having to put a $5 to $10 GPS chip in there is fairly expensive."

Adding Wi-Fi to mobile devices costs money, too, but Morgan says equipment makers are more likely to include it because the technology has uses beyond pinpointing locations. Moreover, it's a cost consumers may willingly bear because of Wi-Fi's utility.

Developing for mobile network operators such as Cingular and Verizon also can be expensive, Morgan says. Verizon, for example, doesn't charge developers a membership fee, but developers working on Qualcomm's Brew development platform, the source of software in many Verizon phones, face fees of as much as $15,000 for Elite-level membership in the Brew Developer Alliance Program. Fees buy benefits such as technical and marketing support.

Getting a software app approved can be an ordeal, Morgan says. "You submit your application, and they go through multiple tests ... to decide whether it's the kind of app they want to have on their network," he says. "That can take six to nine months. Then when it gets out, you have to pay the operating system license, and the provider gets something like 30% to 40% of whatever you make." That doesn't leave much for the developers, so every penny saved is important.