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 billion and is expected to reach $10.1 billion 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.