Broadcom Collaboration with Skyhook Wireless to Promote Location-Based Services on Mobile Devices

As an effort to promote higher system reliability on GPS (Global Positioning System) and LBS (Location-based services) usage, Broadcom has announced the collaboration plan to work with Skyhook Wireless to enhance its next generation mobile device chipset and LBS infrastructure function. As you may know, Skyhook Wireless is famous for its location tracking capability based on Wi-Fi wireless technology that has been utilized extensively in Apple’s latest 3G/GPS based iPhones.

Instead of locking to four satellites orbiting around the earth to obtain accurate positioning information, Skyhook’s wireless technology utilizes a slightly different approach that able to keep track of wireless signals from cellular base stations and analyze them triangularly and cross map against the geographical information in its database to determine the users’ current location. This will definitely help in faster position tracking especially when traveling in the tunnel or staying under the roof whereby satellite reception is weak.

By having this technology convergence, mobile device manufacturers will be able to enjoy better flexibility in design with the assistance of this all-in-one hybrid chipset embedded into their end products such as GPS, smart phones and PNDs (Personal Navigation Device). It is expected that the move will further lead to how consumers use their mobile devices in short future.