The world we live in is three dimensional, however, in the “location” and “geospatial” world we have largely been confined to two dimensions. Soon this is about to change, as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which is responsible for establishing rules of operation for wireless carriers in the US, has established a metric of ‘3m’ (or 9ft) for finding people in the vertical dimension (Z-axis) when they dial 911. This would come into effect in April 2021.
The new requirements will have a transformational effect on the location and geospatial industry similar to the original horizontal (X/Y) requirement that FCC imposed on wireless carriers in 2000, which led to the introduction of GPS chipsets into cell phones and the subsequent creation of applications ranging from Google Maps and Uber to powerful new analytical capabilities based on geospatial data.
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Some of the transformational benefits for the capability will include being able to find callers who dial 911 not just horizontally but also precisely vertically. Tests conducted by firefighters in San Francisco allowed them to locate the emergency caller nearly ten times faster when they had altitude information.
Fresh challenges
In this new three dimensional paradigm, there are challenges and opportunities – how do you get indoor maps and building information in a scalable manner, what privacy requirements are required to ensure user location is protected and made available in a manner that gives the user the appropriate controls, what new data sources and meta information will emerge to use this new dimension to augment the already rich information available in the horizontal. We don’t have all the answers right now but as these building blocks come into place, I am confident we as an industry would be able to address them.
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