GPS location technology has gained public awareness for vehicle navigation applications but has yet to make an impact on the European mobile handset market and the operators hold the key to making this happen.

This contrasts with the situation in the US where the telecoms regulator has decided to act against several US wireless operators over their failure to achieve the target set for customers to have E911 location capability.

“If you look at the worldwide market-place you find GPS in a lot of mobile phones on the CDMA network and a fair few in 3G phones, but not many in GSM phones,” said Dr Clive de la Fuente from the Location and Timing KTN (Knowledge Transfer Network).

“The real holder of the keys in this chain is the operators and if they see lots of money then they’ll specify GPS. But until they really specify it I think people are hesitant to come out with something that’s going to cost a little bit more with GPS in.”

Part of the reluctance is that it is easier to put GPS in a CDMA handset because it is a time synchronised network while GSM is not, although companies such as CSR are addressing this. De la Fuente also said Qualcomm supplies GPS embedded in its CDMA ICs “almost for free”.

The driver for the technology in the US has been the E911 mobile emergency location legislation, but the E112 European version does not have such stringent accuracy requirements meaning cheaper technologies will suffice.

“If you haven’t got that impetus then the driver is location based services [LBS],” said de la Fuente. “And if you look at Korea and Japan they are making money out of LBS, but maybe not as much as European operators see they can make from other things [video, cameras, mobile TV].”