Opinion: The challenges of mobile geo-location

Delaware and New Jersey went live with regulated egaming in October and November respectively. These states followed on from Nevada which was the first state to go live, albeit only with online poker.

These online gaming launches bring to the forefront the discussion about the key issue of ‘geo-location’: the ability to locate where players are physically placed when they’re interacting with egaming services. It is often proscribed in law that players must be physically located within the relevant jurisdiction when they interact with the services.

Get geo-location right on mobile and you give your egaming product a key market advantage. It will pass through the approvals processes more smoothly in the more stringently regulated jurisdictions, facilitating both speed-to-market and the acquisition of a broader client base. Accurate geo-location tools can also significantly support marketing and product development disciplines through the supply of sophisticated customer behaviour intelligence.

Getting mobile and location right also avoids the risks, both reputational and commercial, that would be incurred if local or jurisdictional requirements are transgressed. Where jurisdictions proscribe, in law, that players must be ‘in jurisdiction’ in order to legally interact with the service, there is significant potential harm if gaming services are consumed by users outside of that jurisdiction.

Non-compliance can affect operators’ current gaming licences and can go as far as criminal conviction for company executives. Getting geo-location right on mobile devices (as with any other distribution channel) is therefore critical for both operators and payment partners.

Geo-location through IP-checking and validation for the desktop channel is well-established. For mobile devices however, this (IP) method alone is insufficient due to the nature of IP-routing within mobile networks. A mobile network can , and will, route its web traffic through just a few (or even a single) data centre and IP-location, so all users could appear to be in the same area regardless of their actual location.

There are multiple options of location ascertainment on the mobile channel, from using a location provided by the mobile device itself (for example GPS), to the cellular mast location, to wifi network ID. The key challenge is configuring these options in an appropriate manner to enable the most accurate results for each mobile device. This is particularly important given mobile devices apply various location look-up processes, some in a non-standard manner.

After the location has been determined, there is a further challenge facing the gaming operators, their accreditation partners and the relevant regulatory bodies: the validation process.

Geo-location checking (on a very high-level view) goes through two steps:

· Step one: determine the location

· Step two: check that location is in a valid area.

Step two can be achieved by sending information off to a third party that performs an IP-location check. This, however, may return just a yes/no response as to whether the IP-location is an allowed location. Some accreditation bodies/regulators require more transparent, more auditable information such as latitude/longitude coordinates.

If you are offering online gaming, then a significant number of your players will access your services from a mobile device whether or not you have promoted a ‘mobile’ specific service. It is important to your marketing efforts, your organisation as a whole, and potentially to the executives of your organisation personally, that the mobile channel is given specific consideration when it comes to the geo-location process.