Location-Enabled Services Find Their Place

Location-enabled services evoke images of emergency response devices that pinpoint critical situations or mapping diagrams called up on the Internet. A huge, virtually untapped market, however, awaits those who create advanced applications by linking location information to messaging and multimedia in wireless networks.

Location is more than just where one is. It is also about where one is going and how one gets there. Today there is a new path that accelerates creation of location-enabled services by combining the speed of IT development with the familiarity of the telecom world.

Known as service delivery platforms (SDPs), these platforms open the telecom infrastructure for service creation and flexible access to networks. Creating products via SDP is similar to the open development common in the PC world where applications are rapidly and consistently launched.

The Canvas LES (Location Enabling Server) is integrated with Telenity's Canvas CSP (Converged Services Platform), both of which operate in the wireless IP arena. The Canvas suite of products shares a common operating environment that supports operations, administration and maintenance functions for a complete, end-to-end integrated system. Its open application programming interfaces (APIs) are the primary tools that ensure rapid creation. LES dramatically cuts development time and provides a venue for third-party developers.

“The service delivery architecture and paradigm are critical in bringing new services to market and increasing revenue streams for those services,” explains Kevin McCracken, senior manager of GSM/UMTS marketing at Nortel Networks.

“Traditionally, wireless networks have been about one service and that service was providing voice communication between two or multiple people. As higher speed data-capable networks have been deployed, this has enabled enhanced services to be launched into the wireless marketplace. The Canvas platform bridges the gap between an open IT application development environment and the wireless environment in a modular fashion. It allows us to pick a particular function for one customer and they can add to it down the road quite easily. That is a benefit not just for the development of new services up front, but also in the evolution of a customer's business model.”

Nortel Networks recently integrated and resold Telenity's Canvas LES and the Canvas RTMS (Resource Tracking and Management System) with Nortel Networks' Mobile Location Center (MLC). The joint solution was deployed by the Telecommunications Services of Trinidad and Tobago Ltd. (TSTT), a GSM/GPRS network operator.

The initial entrées of location offerings focused on one-dimensional, find-a-phone applications. As the market begins to mature, new offerings combine location information with still photos or streaming video, capturing both the look and feel of a site. A primary difference, though, between data-driven products like LES and early voicecentric applications is that many of the location services are created by third parties, not solely by network operators.

“Like any new service, carriers weren't really sure how location information was going to be used,” says Jonathan Spinney , industry manager for location-based services at ESRI Inc. “There was a lot of talk about privacy and carriers began to wonder if they just needed to develop the services themselves, brand them and take care of it all.

“Telenity's platform actually solves a lot of those problems at a technical level. It has capabilities to integrate with the carrier/subscriber portal to manage privacy and permissions. That means networks can begin to open up.”

When a customer of Nortel Networks recently approached the company with an urgent request for an advanced location-based platform, Nortel called on its LBS partner, Telenity.

“Our customers ask us to provide them with options to be able to launch end-to-end solutions, including what Nortel provides as well as any partners that we are able to bring to the table,” explains McCracken. “What this does from the customer's perspective is minimize the time to market overall for them to analyze the marketplace, assess different vendors and initiate deployment.”

An open service-creation platform and increasing acceptance of third-party contributions signal a shift in the rate and approach to product development in the wireless community. This paradigm is a means for carriers to build up their embedded infrastructure investments and define a path for continuous return on investment.