The Sky's the Limit

The GPS constellation orbits at about 10,988 miles above the earth. By comparison, the International Space Station and the Space Shuttle orbit at about 230 miles; the moon orbits at 239,000 miles. The two pieces of information that every GPS satellite beams down constantly -- time and location -- come out of the sky with the "brightness" of a 40-watt lightbulb. So my handheld GPS device is seeing the light of a 40-watt bulb from 11,000 miles away. All of the trigonometry -- triangulating position using the satellite data -- is done down here.

GPS signals are free to anyone, anywhere, courtesy of U.S. taxpayers. The system has cost $9 billion to develop, launch, and sustain over 30 years; in the Iraqi war alone, it surely saved tens of millions of dollars in munitions costs. Today, the GPS industry in North America is estimated at $4 billion a year by Frost & Sullivan, driven in part by dramatic improvements in GPS technology on the ground. In the late 1980s, one of the first receivers to be developed was installed on Trident submarines. Two men had to carry it, and it had to be designed to fit through a submarine's hatch. A typical handheld 15 years later is capable of far more, and the guts of even the most advanced GPS devices are the size of a postage stamp.

Dozens of companies are in the GPS business, from major household names like Boeing, Motorola, Qualcomm, Delphi, and Bosch, to smaller, GPS-centric companies like Trimble, Thales, and SiRF, to obscure companies like Symmetricom, which specializes in timing.

The U.S. government is fueling a GPS boom in one corner of the industry with the E911 mandate. By the end of 2005, all cell phones sold in the United States must be able to report their location automatically with great accuracy so that callers in trouble can be found by 911 operators. Many cell-phone manufacturers are meeting that requirement by putting GPS chips into their products. The phones will then be more-advanced versions of my Garmin handheld. My Garmin can tell me where I am -- but if I don't know the location of something that I need, or if I know exactly where I am but can't tell anyone, I'm still lost.

The GPS-equipped cell phone will know where it is and be able to report that information. Great in an emergency, and incredibly useful if I need a bookstore in unfamiliar territory, or if I can't find my hotel, or if I'm on a road trip and want to know whether I can make it to my destination with the gas that I have left. One can imagine all kinds of services that could be beamed to a location-aware cell phone. One can also imagine all kinds of marketing pitches beamed to a cell phone that is constantly reporting its location.

But the consumer-GPS sector is in its infancy compared with the commercial sector -- and even that is just taking off. One of the oldest GPS companies, Trimble, in Sunnyvale, California, is a kind of IBM of GPS: making chips, selling devices, and offering services. Michael Lesyna, vice president of Trimble's mobile-solutions division, is focusing on bringing a highly refined version of the tracking system that Con-Way NOW uses (provided by competitor Qualcomm) to all kinds of commercial truck fleets. Trimble has begun with the ready-mix concrete business, equipping cement mixers with GPS sensors and cell-phone data communicators.

What Trimble and others are quickly discovering is that GPS is what might be called a doorway technology. Once concrete companies know where their cement mixers are, "they want to know everything," says Lesyna. "When the truck left the [cement] plant, when it arrived at the job site, how fast it went, when it started to pour concrete, when it finished pouring, when it left the job site, when it arrived back at the plant."

Some of those questions -- location? speed? -- are related to GPS, and some just naturally arise once a company starts to ask questions. Trimble installs a battery of non-GPS-related sensors that measure everything from drum rotation to the amount of water added to the ready-mix concrete at the job site. Trimble's technology also sets up a "geo-fence" -- virtual fencing around cement plants or job sites that lets the concrete truck report when it enters or leaves a particular site. Because geo-fences are just coordinates in a computer program, they don't require any additional work; Trimble can automatically geo-fence a customer's site using the site's address.

This kind of GPS and communications equipment -- it costs about $2,900 per truck, plus $50 per truck per month -- makes a vast array of data about a company's truck fleet available. How long do trucks idle in the morning before being loaded? How long do they wait before being unloaded? Are the drivers driving safely? Are routes and job assignments efficient? Trimble's system can reveal the route of every truck in the fleet for every minute of every day. All of the data is available instantly over the Internet.