4G, Devices, Uniform Identity, and Location

With broadband 4G technologies such as WiMax, Mobility (i.e. Connectivity & Location) finds its way into every product and service and thereby makes those products and services more valuable—according to McGuire’s Law.  Products that increase in value through Mobility might include portable PCs, ultra mobile PCs, personal media players, mp3 players, digital cameras, digital video recorders, PC cards, PNDs, PDAs, Smartphone’s, mobile phones, and any other electronic device that benefits from broadband connectivity and Location derived context-awareness.  The services atop these devices similarly increase in value with both the number of devices they are able to support, and the more creatively they fuse information, entertainment, and communications experiences.  This fusion assumes user-identification uniformity across all devices and services, but currently, network-based location derived context is confined to mobile phones and their associated phone number identities.  This is the problem… 

Existing mobile location network API standards request and retrieve Location data based on a phone number—the cellular world’s identity-management primary key.  But PCs have media access control (MAC) addresses, mp3 players have serial numbers, other devices may have some other unique semantic ID specific to a manufacturing practice or perhaps even an application service married to a dedicated device.  In tomorrow’s converged 4G world, the lack of a uniform user-ID common to all devices requires rewriting or inventing new Location API standards to support holistic service experiences that run across multiple devices.  In addition to a consistent cross-device user ID framework, cross-application user identity aliasing and federated repositories are also needed to support fused service interoperability.  Where will these new standards live?  W3C, the IEEE, OMA, the WiMax Forum, the OGC, or a new focus group not yet formed?     

This entry was contributed by Jonathan Spinney