Smartphone Locating Aid for Rescues Pushed as GE Objects

Smartphone Locating Aid for Rescues Pushed as GE Objects

Technology to help police locate wireless callers inside buildings advanced with a U.S. regulator past objections from General Electric Co. (GE), Google Inc. (GOOG) and the E-ZPass Group toll system that it may interfere with millions of devices.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski yesterday asked fellow commissioners to approve closely held Progeny LMS LLC’s location system, Neil Grace, an FCC spokesman, said today. To proceed, the measure needs a majority of commissioner votes.

Under Progeny’s proposal, smartphones would calculate their position using radio waves put out by the company, and would report that location during emergency calls. In tests, Progeny’s technology was able to pinpoint within 2 meters (2.2 yards) the vertical position of the calling party, “potentially revolutionizing the speed of emergency response in large multi-story urban environments,” the company said in a filing.

Progeny’s technology represents “a clear improvement” over current techniques, which don’t offer reliable location information for indoor calls from wireless phones, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, an Alexandria, Virginia-based membership organization, said in an FCC filing.Progeny “is trying to cure the problem of E911 from wireless phones,” the company’s chief executive officer, Gary Parsons, said in an interview. “When you go indoors, they don’t know where you are.”

Airwave Interference

Progeny, based in McLean, Virginia, and Sunnyvale, California, paid for its airwaves license at an auction in 1999. Most devices using nearby airwaves can’t detect Progeny’s signal and those that do are able to continue operating, the company said in a filing last year.

Wireless systems that could suffer interference from Progeny include networks used to monitor medical patients’ glucose, meter utilities, and operate valves and pumps in water systems, according to a January filing by companies including GE, based in Fairfield, Connecticut, and pipeline operator Kinder Morgan Inc.

Progeny would place at risk the operation of “millions of unlicensed devices,” the filing’s signers said without supplying a specific figure.

The FCC should reject Progeny’s proposal for “high-power transmitters that may interfere with millions of lower-powered unlicensed devices,” search engine owner Google, based in Mountain View, California, said in a Jan. 29 filing. Airwaves should be kept clear to meet increasing demand from tablet computers and machine-to-machine networking, the company said.

E-ZPass Concern

Interference from the system could hamper the free flow of traffic if electronic toll gates don’t work, the E-ZPass Group, which has issued more than 23 million mobile devices through member agencies in 14 states including New York and New Jersey, said in a filing.

E-ZPass asked for more testing, as did Kapsch TrafficCom AG (KTCG), which makes gear for E-ZPass members.

Progeny won’t operate in airwaves likely to interfere with E-ZPass operations, Parsons said in a May 9 letter to E-ZPass.

Parsons is a former head of XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc., now part of Sirius XM Radio Inc. (SIRI)

Progeny is part of NextNav, which lists investors including Alexandria, Virginia-based technology-investing firm Columbia Capital, Goldman Sachs Investment Partners, part of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, and Telcom Ventures LLC, based in Miami.

To win final FCC approval the Progeny’s proposal needs support of a majority of voting commissioners. Genachowski, chairman since 2009, has said he will depart May 17, leaving the agency with two Democrats and one Republican after another departure that day.

To contact the reporter on this story: Todd Shields in Washington at tshields3@bloomberg.net;