On Mar 10, 2010, at 8:36 AM, Brian Rosen wrote:

> I suppose that it's conceivable that every carrier, the FCC, NENA and APCO
> are all stupid.

The 100 m/95% is a requirement, not an attempt to describe current GPS 
performance. As far as I know, the requirement was stated when GPS SA 
(selective availability) was still enabled.


> 
> On the other hand, the carriers spend millions of dollars testing every
> year.  So, perhaps they aren't quite so stupid.

I'm afraid I'm missing how this relates to my note. Did I accuse anybody of 
being stupid?

> 
> I don't have access to the full paper to understand what a "20 minute field
> test" is, but the largest problem for 100 meter 95% confidence is the fact
> that the GPS is not always enabled (for battery drain reasons) and unless
> it's on and seeing satellites for many minutes, you don't get really good
> accuracy.  Also, field tests are usually conducted in open sky situations,
> and not urban canyons, or even tree leaf cover situations, which degrade
> performance considerably.


As an aside, this illustrates that the 95% number is pretty meaningless. Does 
it mean 95% of all calls (lots more emergency calls are made from indoors and 
the urban canyons of Manhattan than from open fields) or 95% of all sample 
points? Is it measured immediately after turning on the device or after waiting 
N minutes?

Without such detail, making precise statements is just pretend-precision. 

Henning
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