Telecom Lead Team: Indian mobile market has the optimum
potential for the location-based services (LBS), as it has one of the largest
wireless networks in the world with around 900 million subscribers. The network
operators can reap significant benefits from this service.
Indian operators are looking at offering LBS to provide
information services, navigation, city sightseeing, public services,
location-based charging services, call routing, assets management, traffic
monitoring, mobile yellow pages and advertisements.
The network providers can earn considerable revenues by
offering such services. The major chunk of the revenue would be from the
advertisements. Through LBS, network operators can offer location-based and
targeted advertisements to the customers.
Globally, smartphones have seen a massive uptake and in
India too, as consumers are opting for the next-gen smartphones. These
smartphones offer great mobility to the consumers and because of it mobile
operators in India can earn high revenue from location based advts.
Factors like- Network based technologies,
consumers’ need for LBS, app development ecosystem, regulatory mandate and
accessibility of high end handsets will drive the growth of LBS in India. LBS
is a $20 billion potential value market and 70 percent of people say that they
use services like navigation, alerts etc,” said Rajesh Gandhi, AVP VAS
Technologies & Enterprise Solutions at TATA Teleservices.
Many information companies like Oracle have come up with certain Big Data
solutions, which can help the service providers to offer location-based
targeted advertisements to the customers.
With the help of location-navigation of customers and
specifically tabulated data by these data solutions, operators can place
advertisements to consumers, which could possess good chances to execute, as
they are based on their preferences.
At the recently held LBS India 2012
business conference Sivarama Krishna, executive director, Consulting of
PricewaterhouseCoopers discussed the issue of revenue for the operators and
said, Mobile operators can earn high revenue from Location Based Ads. The
elections are approaching and this opportunity can give an immense amount of
revenue through the Location Based Ads, leave the rest”.
Krishna, however, added that the key
factors like- complex ecosystem, marketing & promotion of services,
business models, security/privacy issues and infrastructure constraints can
hinder the deployment of LBS in India.
In addition, less coverage of signals in rural and
semi-urban areas could also pose a challenge for the operators to offer LBS.
According to a study by Juniper Research, the rapid
evolution of mobile phones, both on hardware and a software level, combined
with a surge in apps with deployments of higher-capacity network infrastructure
and recent developments in positioning technologies could drive revenues from
mobile location-based services to more than $12.7 billion by 2014.
The study found that improvements in
handset UIs together with easier consumer access to a range of app distribution
channels had led to greater interest from service providers in providing mobile
location-based applications. The study also predicted that advertising will
likely form an increasing share of MLBS-related revenues over the next five
years.
By Danish Khan
[email protected]
