> It's also disappointing that they're focused on the benefits for law enforcement and carriers rather than handset makers and end users. That's just politics.

> It's also disappointing that they're focused on the benefits for law enforcement and carriers rather than handset makers and end users. That's just politics. The cell carriers know they need to get regulatory approval from government agencies before they begin to sell the technology to the public. That regulatory approval is more likely if they can show a governmental advantage, like pinning down the location of a drug dealer or a terrorist chatting on his cell phone. The real advantage for the carriers, by the way, is they can make a planned tower switch for a moving phone more accurately if they have both position and velocity information. It's hard to get a velocity vector if you can't resolve a position to better than 3/4 mile, what you get with signal strength measurements and no time-of-flight. (The Doppler effect could provide velocity as well, but without a very good direction of motion.)