Success Story | TruePosition

Introduction

In a powerful demonstration of versatility, Continuous Computing deployed its Trillium Professional Services team in combination with its field-proven Trillium software in a highly successful customer engagement for TruePosition, Inc., a full-service provider of wireless location technologies and solutions.

By supporting TruePosition in the optimization of Trillium SS7 and SIGTRAN software stacks and signaling architecture, Continuous Computing once again proved the advantages of combining Trillium Professional Services with standards-based Trillium protocol stacks.

Offering key assistance and expertise that only the Trillium Professional Services team can provide, TruePosition maximized the value of its Trillium software license and, in turn, achieved lasting operational efficiencies through faster technical support response times and lower personnel costs.

Business Challenges

Location-based services (LBS) are being introduced by more and more wireless operators worldwide. In the United States, LBS growth has been driven primarily by Enhanced-911 (E-911) directives from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). E-911 services promote public safety and save lives by allowing emergency responders to pinpoint a caller's location. The challenge is ensuring that E-911 is always accurate, works with all cell phones, and operates consistently in all environments - urban, suburban, rural, or indoors. Rural operators sometimes face special hurdles due to their smaller size and commensurately lower bargaining power, limited technology options, and difficult radio frequency terrains. For LBS to succeed, operators must be able to provide high quality of service, value, and usability regardless of the nature of the environment. Now that regulatory pressure is subsiding, carrier resources are available to pursue revenue-generating services based on their wireless location infrastructure investment. With the foundation in place to support robust applications, carriers look to create substantial revenue from wireless location applications. Typical services offered to users include people trackers (Family Monitoring or Friend Finder), local search/directory services, traffic updates, and services comparable to in-car GPS navigation systems, but for a fraction of the cost. Technical requirements for LBS vary by region, service type, and application.

While some consumer LBS applications have become popular in certain user segments, challenges remain in performance and usability. Poor user interface and browser performance in cell phones have impeded LBS utilization. Subscribers want the services and interfaces to be simple and straightforward rather than complex and time-consuming. Current LBS applications are often too slow and cumbersome to use. For example, with Friend Finder services, users may not want to allow their friends to track their location at all times. On some cell phones, turning off the tracker requires five to six levels of menu navigation and up to 60 seconds of waiting time, which discourages many subscribers from activating and using the service consistently. This complicated process emphasizes the need for simplicity and ease-of-use.

LBS offers many exciting opportunities to engage subscribers and drive Average Revenue Per User (ARPU). For instance, child safety is an ever-increasing concern for parents. With more than 40 million children aged 5-14 years old in the United States, the market for Child Tracking devices is growing rapidly. A recent survey demonstrates that 82 percent of American mothers aged 25-34 years stated they would be interested in a service enabling them to locate or monitor a child. Leveraging currently available location technology, a parent can request positional updates from a child's cell phone and view the child's location on a map via the Web, or as a street location via a text message. The application can also incorporate other advanced features, including the ability to define a geographic boundary around a location such as a school. This feature - called "geofencing" - would allow a child's position to be quickly confirmed as being inside or outside the defined zone at the time of the request. With this LBS application, a high level of positional accuracy, comparable to that of an E-911 application, would be expected.

Customer Collaboration

TruePosition incorporated Trillium software into its system in 2003 under a software license agreement with Continuous Computing. Trillium software provides the essential standards-based protocol stacks required by LBS. Furthermore, TruePosition incorporated Trillium's fault tolerant capabilities, which protect the LBS application against failures and ensure it provides services reliably.

After making some modifications, TruePosition recently sought to synchronize its code base with the standard Trillium products so that the company could fully and readily utilize the standard Trillium software patches and updates. Upon learning that Trillium engineering resources and training were available on a dedicated, as-needed basis for a reasonable fee, TruePosition retained Trillium Professional Services from Continuous Computing to integrate the Trillium software with its equipment and systems. Specifically, the Trillium Professional Services team incorporated the following Trillium protocol layers: SCCP, MTP-3, M3UA, SCTP, TUCL and MTSS-Solaris. To accomplish the integration, the team developed a stack architecture involving a back-to-back configuration (two stacks) running on two Sun SPARC servers with Solaris 2.8 and interfacing with the Interphase Communications 5339F communications controller drivers (line cards) through a convergence layer provided by Interphase (see Figure 1).

To demonstrate the functionality of the integrated stack, the Trillium Professional Services team developed an SCCP sample application and a sample stack manager. The team also provided custom on-site training on SS7, SIGTRAN and high availability, and provided advice on how to implement a stack manager.

Success with Continuous Computing

For a fraction of the cost of recruiting and hiring additional engineering resources, TruePosition's code base is now more stable and effectively aligned to incorporate updates as a result of the work done by the Trillium Professional Services team. Furthermore, after just a few weeks of training and direct interaction with the Trillium Professional Services engineering resources, TruePosition is able to respond to technical support issues faster. Pleased with the bottom-line results and value, TruePosition has extended its contract with Trillium Professional Services in order to obtain access to a wide array of additional services and offerings, including:

• Exchanging architecture, design, and test documents
• Detailed workshops with subject matter experts
• Test strategy / review sessions for new Trillium roadmap releases
• Establish TruePosition's specific testing mechanisms
• Regular working sessions during strategic product releases
• On-site assistance during specific deployments and customer-affecting issues
• New features and enhancements
• Trillium software upgrade alignment with TruePosition's releases
• Performance benchmarking and tuning

With Continuous Computing's support, TruePosition can continue to provide value-added services, lower its risk, and focus on helping carriers to bring high-value location-based services to market.