Operators have USD 12 billion LBS expectations — MobileMonday Global: Industry News

^{CPS in-depth operator survey} Operators have USD 12 billion LBS expectations

21 Nov 2004 at 19:54 GMT Timo Poropudas

Mobile operators are forecasting major growth in revenues from high accuracy location-based services to almost USD 12bn by 2005 – but only if low cost mass market enabling technologies are in place to drive the market. In addition, the surveyed operators anticipate the per subscriber billing to grow to USD 35 by 2008. The CPS survey also discovered that demand for sub-100m high accuracy solutions is growing as operators seek to differentiate their service offerings in saturating markets, however, while high accuracy location solutions will be the catalyst for location-based services, deployment costs must be extremely cost-effective if they are to kick-start mass-market LBS adoption. Cell-ID based services have proved disappointing in terms of application innovation and consumer take-up, the study revealed. The operators expect the early demand to come from corporate vehicle, fleet and workforce management. The major consumer market driver will be information services, with rapid growth predicted for personal and child safety services. However, mobile gaming and m-coupons, cited as a strong growth areas in hopeful industry reports, will remain niche markets with slower than expected growth