The public angst surrounding Google's Wi-Fi sniffing activities involves the revelation that the company allegedly accumulated hundreds of gigabytes of potentially personal information from Wi-Fi networks while taking photographs for its Street View project. This may or may not be a legal issue, but the concerns being raised reflect the fact that what Google is doing – basically creating a "world in a database" for location-based services – is largely a compromise made in order to meet consumer demand for location information.

They and other companies do it because it is generally difficult for arbitrary applications to tap into the location service that many wireless networks already support. However, the wireless and general broadband industries are about to change as universal, IP-based standards for supporting location are on their way. The scene is set for wireless operators to rejoin the location-based services value-chain with consumer-friendly location-enabled networks.

What Google and other companies are doing is basically in response to demand for supporting location applications on smartphones and other mobile devices. These companies are looking to capitalize on demand for location-based services by taking on the ambitious task of surveying the world, or at least the parts considered important enough, to build a database that maps location to visible radio signal sources. Such "world in a database" (WiDB) location services rely on measuring infrastructure that is not owned, operated or otherwise under the control of the implementer of the location service, including cell towers and Wi-Fi access points.

WiDB involves measuring and storing records related to other people's generally private property. This may or may not be a legal issue, but the concerns being raised reflect the fact that the solution is largely a compromise. This compromise really originates from the fact that location-determination capabilities already exist within many mobile networks in support of emergency services. The problem is simply that the location information has not been accessible in the ways that device owners and network subscribers want to use it.

Mobile networks, especially in the United States, have had the ability to determine and provide the location of end-devices for a decade and more. However, both the technical architecture of that capability and the business models applied to it often have been slanted toward supporting operator-controlled applications such as friend-finders and corporate fleet tracking. This walled-garden approach to the location-determination service is not naturally sympathetic to the model of user-controlled applications as we see emerging with smartphones and app stores. The result has been a vacuum that was not being filled by the network operators and ended up being filled by companies such as Google.

The situation is set to change, however. To date there has not been a single device-independent and application-independent way that a network could provide a location service to end-devices. However, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is currently publishing new specifications that describe how an IP network – any IP network including 3G – can provide a location service using standardized IP protocols. HELD (for HTTP-Enabled Location Delivery) is a protocol that allows any device to query a network for its location. Because HELD is an IP standard (in the same sense as HTTP, DNS or NTP, for example, are open standards allowing them to work on an IP network for any IP device) any networkable computing device, wired or mobile, can ask the network for location.

The devices can do this regardless of the exact nature of the network (e.g. broadband DSL, enterprise LAN or mobile 3G/4G). This is a critical distinction. A location-sensitive application on an iPad, for example, should be able to get access to location information even if it's connected to a residential LAN connected via DSL without the presumption of it seeing known cell towers or Wi-Fi access points. In other words, these protocols create the same sort of common application programming interface (API) on the network which all applications on all devices can take advantage of. It is essentially the network equivalent of what the Android API does for applications running on that platform.

HELD creates the ability to obviate the current crop of concerns related to the Google location service. Because the operator that owns the network can use its own infrastructure as a source of measurements, it does not need to rely on storing records related to other people's property. Because the operator is local to the point that location is being requested and used, it is subject to the applicable jurisdiction's legislation and requirements associated with the handling of that location data. It is not an extra-jurisdictional entity on the other side of the Internet that has surveyed and is storing individuals' location information in effectively off-shore systems.

Further, because the network operator's coverage is by definition wherever the user is able to attach to the network, the operator can ensure that the location service is available everywhere the network is. Systems such as Google's cannot offer any such guarantees. Of additional concern is the veracity of the location information and the limited extent to which WiDB systems can provide guarantees. WiDB is totally dependent on the measurements provided by the client device. There are numerous examples available on the Internet that highlight how readily these systems can be spoofed.

The conclusion then is that network operators have a significant opportunity to capitalize on their installed location capabilities for uses other than emergency calling. The compromises, workarounds and current crop of concerns associated with location service WiDB such as Google's can be obviated. While the architectures that were first defined for cellular emergency calling did not result in network location services sympathetic to the modern mobile device paradigm, the next generation of Internet location-service architectures and protocols are highly in tune with this model.

Network operators are best positioned to offer the accurate, reliable and ubiquitous location information that subscribers in the future will desire. In general, many already have the machinery needed for a great location service and only need to change the way it is accessed. For the sake of privacy or at least diminished concern about potential violations thereof, let's hope they do so.

Martin Dawson is director of mobile location for Andrew Solutions, a CommScope company.