I think most fleet management apps currently run with SMS in Europe and sometimes from data calls, latency times can often be up to 15 secs or more for SMS.
The agreement says that there must a 15 sec between the GPS fix and the data being made available to the user, NOT the application. Just introduce a flat 15sec delay on all GPS fixes and it is no longer a real time or near real time system and it is no longer a fleet management system either, therefore you are excempt from the EULA. I guess you actually have Fleet historical reporting application now.

to Quote
"Fleet Applications" shall mean software, products or systems capable, in real-time or near-real time, of any one or more of locating, monitoring, tracking, ...."
and
"Near real-time" takes into account network latency, transmission time and any other systems delays. For the purpose of the MapPoint 2003 EULA, we will interpret any application that has a guaranteed minimum of 15 seconds between acquisition of the location fix and the availability of this location fix to the user as a NON near real-time solution (and therefore not subject to Fleet Application licensing restrictions."


Therefore lets just guarantee a minimum delay of 16 seconds between actually GPS measurement and the availability of the data to the USER which is good enough for most applications and fleet managers I know.
If you are clever you could calculate the network latency for say a SMS message by sbtracting the very accurate GPS timestamp from another accurate timesource,(either from an accurate PC clock or perhaps the mobile network providers timestamp if delivered with a SMS message) that represents the time that the users application receives the data and only add the neccasery delay that is needed to bring you upto 16 seconds. In some instances this may actually be 0.
For example GPS reading taken at 13:00:00hrs , the SMS is received by the APPLICATION at 13:00:09hrs, now let the application add a 7sec delay and give the USER the results at 13:00:16hrs. For data calls just add a flat 16 delay to all co-ordinates.
I'll call this Dynamic Delay Timing, or DDT. Now do you think DDT could be harmfull to anyones harshly imposed restrictions?

I was thinking the same thing.
To expand on your idea - if you have, say, three MapPoint licences, could you track/locate/monitor up to three vehicles in real-time and impose the 16s artificial delay on any others?
The reason I am interested in this idea is that in my application (which does use SMS by the way), a delay of up to a minute is usually acceptable, but from time to time I would like to reduce this delay to a minimum.

Also, what does 'user' mean in this sense? Is it a human being or any application program integrated with the MapPoint software? You might have to make sure your delay is imposed before it reaches this application.

Since this thread was posted, Microsoft amended the EULAs and created a special license for fleet management. I think that was in 2005 or around then. Details of the MapPoint 2009 Fleet License can be found on the Microsoft website, here:

http://www.microsoft.com/mappoint/en-us/Fleet.aspx

I would expect MapPoint 2010 will also have a similar fleet license.