Rosum, a dealer in the use of broadcast TV signals to power location and timing solutions, has stated that they have launched ALLOY, a location and synchronization solution for indoor and urban environments.

 

According to company officials, they developed the new solution through a partnership with Siano, a supplier of Mobile Digital TV receiver chips. ALLOY delivers precise frequency, timing and location information by making use of broadcast TV signals and opens up a multitude of new commercial opportunities by enabling femtocell synchronization and location, tracking of people and assets, and localized advertising over mobile TV devices in deep indoor locations such as shopping malls, hotels, campuses and factories with seamless delivery leveraging broadcast TV signals.

 

The challenge for GPS is that its system relies on radio-frequency signals broadcast at frequencies that are strongly blocked by building materials and that are “blurred” by the strong multi-path effects of urban and suburban environments.

 

A-GPS can work well if multi-path is minimal and building attenuation is low. But Rosum (News - Alert) ALLOY provides a solution that works quickly, out-of-the-box wherever people live leveraging the power and the highly distributed and redundant nature of broadcast TV.

 

The ALLOY client combines the ALLOY chip with a high-sensitivity A-GPS chip into a tightly-coupled hybrid TV-GPS solution which works across all types of environments: rural, suburban, urban, and indoor. 

 

Broadcast TV signals enjoy a 100,000x power margin advantage over GPS, and this extends location and synchronization capabilities deep into buildings and urban environments.

 

Dominique Bonte, Practice Director of Telematics and Navigation has said that the market for wireless location-based applications is expected to reach $14.5 Billion in 2014. The success of these applications will depend on the pervasive availability of the location technologies that enable them. Alternative positioning technologies such as ALLOY are critical while in addressing the limitations of GPS.