What according to you are the current trends in location
based services market world wide and in India?
Location based service (LBS) can be categorized into three segments,
consumer, enterprise and public safety and services. Juniper research estimated
that in 2005, the location based services market stood at $1.1 bn and is
expected to reach $10.1 bn by 2010. And if you break this market into regions,
APAC stands at number one position. In countries such as the US, these services
have been very successful. American company Nextel, has done a remarkable job in
providing location based services to small and medium enterprises and their
APRUs are very high to the extent of $50.
Service
Providers leverage location for services like dispatch services, fleet
management, tracking. Companies like Vodafone have launched many location based
services through their portal. The operators worldwide are trying to put
location as an integral part of their portal strategy and it has been really
successful. There is a plethora of creative applications; even gaming companies
are going after location based services. We are at the stage where the handsets
are ready, networks are ready and now the operators need to drive these
services. Presently operators are busy in deploying IP networks. IMS etc and
these services are being overlooked, but overall there is a lot of growth in the
LBS market. The Indian market is yet to be explored.
What is the difference between traditional LBS on GPS
and LBS on GSM?
The traditional black box GPS services have a very good business case but
the technology is moving towards mass market and the GPS black box devices are
for niche applications and they are not interactive. The GPS infrastructure is
expensive whereas the GSM based location services can be leveraged on the
existing network thereby providing a cost advantage to the service providers.
With the GSM based technology, personalization of location-based services is
possible and that will drive its growth in the market.
What applications except LBS are popular in the VAS
market?
Other than location based services, messaging is a very popular application.
Unified messaging is the future of these services where you have a single
mailbox to keep all messages be it e-mails, SMS, faxes. Service providers are
looking at cutting costs and increasing their margins, convergence provides them
a viable solution and so unified messaging is all set to take over traditional
messaging services. The second important aspect of messaging is wireless
messaging, instant messaging and push to talk, which will be the next generation
of messaging services. Eventually every application is going to be location
based.
What are the issues and challenges related to the
technology behind these services?
One of the issues with location based services is the maturity of the
technology. Reliability, security of content and quality of service are issues
that have come up, but these are being dealt with as the technology is
developing and becoming more mature. Solutions present today provide
authentication of location, privacy of information, security and subscriber
management of information. They provide end user with a control over the level
of privacy more over for location based services, we have to have user's
consent so privacy and security issues have to be dealt with.
What is the future of location based services? What will
drive their growth in the VAS market?
We see networks divided into four areas; there is voice, data, messaging and
location. Location and presence will become the foundation of all the services.
Services like voice, chat, messaging etc are provided separately but ultimately
everything will be a multimodal service. Value added services are expected to
contribute no less than 20-25% of the carrier's revenue and the average in
APAC is 30% and margins form value added services are much higher. LBS services
create revenue streams for all the players, be it content providers, carriers or
solution providers.
Sonia Sharma
sonias@cybermedia.co.in