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Follow UsNEW DELHI, INDIA: Have you ever been in your car, at a mall or some other place outside home and wanted to know right away whether there is a traffic jam ahead, to locate your spouse, or find the closest bakery? Location-based services, now seen as a key differentiator by wireless carriers and their subscribers, offer all that and more. An overview of what location-based services have to offer and a real-life situation showing how the technology can be applied, taking advantage of these services will tell us how it can save time and aggravation in our increasingly wireless world.
Faced with an increasingly difficult challenge in growing ARPUs and numbers of subscribers, wireless carriers and their partners are developing a host of new products, services, and business models based on data services. Location services, which provide information specific to a location, are a key part of this portfolio.
Location-based services offer many opportunities. For the mobile user, some examples of location-based services are requesting the nearest business or service such as an ATM or restaurant, receiving alerts like notification of a sale on gas or warning of a traffic jams and finding a buddy.
The big advantage is that mobile users don't have to manually specify PIN codes or other location identifiers to use location-based services.
What Makes it Work
One of the most obvious technologies behind LBS is positioning, with the most widely recognized system being the Global Positioning System (GPS). There are, however, other means of positioning in addition to GPS. These other technologies are network-based positioning and typically rely on various means of triangulation of the signal from cell sites serving a mobile phone.
| Locating the Value |
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For the carrier, location-based services provide value addition by enabling services such as:
Resource tracking with dynamic distribution: Taxis, service people, rental equipment, doctors, fleet scheduling |
The Indian Scenario
Technology has been available for quite a long time now. We do know that benefits are overwhelming and yet there is not much happening on ground. Lack of sufficient and clear geographic data is dragging the industry back, even as the demand rises. There are many issues while digitizing maps for use online like no systematic addressing scheme of city streets and outdated information. Merging of updated information also takes time and much effort. Mobile application developers are waiting for the mapping industry to mature. Location-based services have moved far beyond in other countries but in India, lack of geographic information system has also limited the use of global positioning system. Global Positioning System (GPS) is the use of satellites to determine a location in co-ordinates. This can then be combined with a digital map to offer LBS services. A US-based firm Wayfinder has signed a deal with MapmyIndia and will start services covering the entire country along with the detailed city coverage of 20 major metropolitan areas initially. By year-end, it will cover all other major cities under MapmyIndia which has the detailed coverage of over 150 major cities in India. Wayfinder will be the only provider in the server-based navigation field with extensive services and map coverage.
BSNL through its partmers is offering LBS capability. The technology for this is provided by Canvas LES, a Location Enabling Server from Telenity. But this is currently restricted to enterprise level service. BSNL plans to offer personalized value added location-based services to its mobile customers. This highly scalable location solution will serve BSNL network BSNL network is expected to grow from approximately 14 mn to 70 mn subscribers, and is expected to support the world's largest deployment till date.
Nilabh Jha
nilabhj@cybermedia.co.in