Location Based Services (LBS)

From INVESaTWIKI

Location Based Services

The LBS market is currently segmented into four categories:

Information and navigation services, which provide data directly to end- users, in particular destination location and criteria for journey optimisation.
Emergency assistance services, which provide the location of mobile users in case of distress and need for assistance.
Tracking services, which provide location data.
Network related services, where knowledge of user position improves communication services.

The LBS market for mobile phone users is discussed in this section. Similar LBS services provided for car and truck drivers are covered by the telematics market under road applications.The potential market for LBS applications is enormous, as it is correlated to the expansion of the mobile phone market. This market, which is still growing, reached 1 billion subscribers at the end of 2002 and a forecast by Pyramid Research expects the value at the end of 2004 could reach € 1.6 billion. It is estimated that when the growth rate slows down in the European region as the market approaches saturation, it will be followed by a spurt in growth in Central Asia (mainly driven by China), and good growth in India. In fact, China is already the lead country for subscribers for by the end of 2003 it had 257 million followed by the USA with 157 million. Forecasts indicate that by 2009, India will have the third largest number of subscribers and that by 2020 there will be 2.8 billion mobile phones in use worldwide. The geographical breakdown can be seen in Figure 1.

Fig.1 Number of mobile phones in use

Adding the facility to compute the location of a mobile subscriber will enable telecom operators to focus on a very large market.
Cambridge Positioning Systems sponsored a study that indicated that global LBS revenues would reach $12 billion in 2005 and $35 billion in 2008 and an even more promising ARC group study in 2002 anticipated World wireless LBS turnover will surge from approximately € 1 billion in 2000 to over € 40 billion in 2006. [1],[2],[3]

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