Q&A: LBS
What are LBS?
How do location-based services work?
What is presence and how is it being incorporated into the LBS roadmap?
With location capabilities taking off in terms of navigation and mapping services, do you foresee new models emerging that take advantage of the benefits of location awareness?
What will be the most important factor in the success of commercial location-based services?
What about customer concerns regarding privacy?
What is the situation with location services and VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol)?
What are LBS?
Location Based Services (LBS) are services offered by operators that provide information specific to a cellular user's location. Location awareness and high accuracy technology can add tremendous value to any application benefiting from the location of a user to provide relevant, contextually accurate location-based content. Location information may be to the cell site level, or eventually within a few meters. It is up to the discretion of each individual operator as to what level of commercial location services they deploy, from mapping and navigation applications to social networking services that use location and presence technologies to enhance their offerings.
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How do location-based services work?
In the case of the device-based applications, it is often the case that the retrieval of location information is initiated by the target-device itself. That is, the device speaks directly with the access network, requests location measurement to occur, and acquires the result of the location calculation directly.
A device-initiated location event is started by the device application through a communication to the back end location server. The device-initiated action begins through a device’s particular request for location processing and is followed by a system-level activity for providing coarse or fine-grain positioning. In this setting, the device application manages the initial request for location and may be followed by either incremental requests for location or follow-on autonomous location "push" actions.
Depending upon the capabilities of the device itself, the result of the initiated location request may involve incremental delivery of information associated with the distinctive positioning action (maps, nearest points-of-interest, etc.). Again, in an autonomous setting, there may be incremental "offline" actions performed by the device based upon this information.
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What is presence and how is it being incorporated into the LBS roadmap?
Presence is the ability to determine if a subscriber is online, if the device is ready to receive services, what device a particular subscriber is using, as well as data about the capabilities of the device (e.g. voice, SMS, MMS, etc.). Presence is critically important to ensure the delivery and receipt of various messaging services and should help enhance the attractiveness of usage.
Location awareness and presence capabilities are presenting new opportunities for operators to not only offer mapping and navigational services, but also to enhance other services such as searching for a nearby business with location features. We look forward to these new service types being developed and deployed by the individual members of 3G Americas.
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With location capabilities taking off in terms of navigation and mapping services, do you foresee new models emerging that take advantage of the benefits of location awareness?
The promise of commercial LBS has been prevalent for several years, and we are finally starting to see navigational services available in the US market. Location awareness and high accuracy technology can add tremendous value to any application benefiting from the location of a user to provide relevant, contextually accurate location-based content. Location information may be to the cell site level, or eventually within a few meters.
This is an exciting space, particularly with new technologies delivering high accuracy solutions. It opens the door for many opportunities and we see four broad areas where new business models can develop:
- Navigation and mapping space. Traditional mobile services require a monthly subscription. Navigation is an ideal area to experiment with one time use or daily use business models. Navigation products are also expanding their feature set to provide services such as localized gas pricing, robust traffic rerouting and voice recognition thus enriching this commercial LBS offering.
- More personalized local services. This will allow a carrier to deliver customized content such as weather and local news based on the users’ current location. It will also allow customers to receive localized alerts such as heavy traffic conditions ahead or severe weather forecasts.
- Extending traditional web based social networking services to the mobile environment. Allowing such communities to take advantage of location to tag photographs, share restaurant recommendations, and find friends on the go. The social networking concept also extends to the family in the form of child finders and family finders. This type of LBS service can alert parents when their child has safely arrived at school or home. These are all emerging uses of location data.
- Local advertising. Location services allow local restaurants and retailers to extend interesting promotional offerings to customers that are nearby. This ability to interact instantly on a one on one level with the customer on the go does not currently exist in any medium.
We look forward to what is on the horizon for commercial LBS.
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What will be the most important factor in the success of commercial location-based services?
High-accuracy location-capable handsets (A-GPS) will enable high-value, high-volume location-based services that will generate sufficient incremental revenue to justify the cost of supporting infrastructure and the differential cost of the handsets.
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What about customer concerns regarding privacy?
The actions of any one carrier will have an effect on the customer’s sense of safety and security. Customers must be given very simple, straightforward and easy-to-use tools to allow them to decide when their location can be shared and when it can not. A strong privacy policy and security implementation at each carrier will be critical as these services role out to customers so they may begin to feel comfortable with them.
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What is the situation with location services and VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol)?
Let’s compare the location based services situation in Internet-based VoIP from providers such as Skype or Vonage with that from wireless cellular service providers. Emerging high-value wireless location-based services benefit from the FCC’s mandate in the U.S. for operators to install high-accuracy systems to automatically locate 911 callers. U.S. wireless network operators are beginning to leverage that infrastructure to support commercial value-added location-based services.
VoIP services are not yet in a similar position. There are no systems in place to automatically locate VoIP callers for 911 or for any other location-sensitive service. Currently, VoIP service users manually register their “home” location for purposes of routing and providing their address on 911 calls to emergency service bureaus. All 911 calls are sent to the location registered by the user. If a VoIP-user calls 911 from other than his/her registered location (i.e. neglects to manually update the registered location), there is no network intelligence to determine the user’s actual location, and the 911 call is still sent to the emergency bureau for the home location. In such a case, a Boston-registered user’s 911 call would be sent to an emergency service bureau in the Boston area (and the emergency bureau is provided with the user’s Boston address for dispatching), even if the user makes the 911 call in Los Angeles.
High-value commercial location-based services would face a similar situation in today’s Internet-based VoIP environment, clearly limiting the value of these services. High-value location-based services for VoIP from providers like Skype and Vonage will only be successful when there are automatic and accurate means put in place to dynamically identify a VoIP user’s true location.
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