United States Leads in Location Aware Services Deployments Today, but the Future Belongs to Europe and Asia

• Posted: Wednesday, April 23, 2008
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• Author: pradhana
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• Filed under: Mobile Services, Wireless Services

User Plane-based location aware capabilities that leverage GPS – applications under the active control of users rather than simple transmission of location information to emergency services – started appearing on CDMA cellular networks in the second half of 2005. Given the prevalence of mobile phones with integrated GPS-CDMA chipsets in the US market, it is no surprise that North America got a head start in deployment of location based services (LBS). At the end of Q1 2008, over 50% of all publicly announced commercial carrier deployments during the preceding 30 months were observed to have taken place in that region.

As 3G service adoption gathers pace worldwide, however, that balance will start to shift, due in large part to the bigger addressable markets to be found in Europe and in particular Asia. ABI Research forecasts a 15% increase in wireless subscriber numbers for Europe (including Eastern Europe and Russia), and a 70 percent increase for Asia-Pacific by the end of 2013. LBS will experience correspondingly strong market growth in those regions, subject to the local popularity of particular services.

“The scarcity of GPS-enabled handsets in GSM-dominated Europe meant that early LBS deployments there were largely based on Cell-ID location, plus some niche markets addressed by GPS-enabled Bluetooth peripherals,” says industry analyst Jamie Moss. “High accuracy location based services were first targeted at enterprise users, but are becoming increasingly available to all as GPS chipsets are being added to WCDMA devices in Europe and Asia.” ABI Research forecasts that up to 38% of all handsets shipped annually will feature integrated GPS by the end of 2013.

“ABI Research classifies location-based applications into five categories,” adds Moss, “personal navigation, enterprise (workforce management/fleet tracking), family tracking, information/ point-of-interest services, and friend-finder/social networking. Many application developers are trying to build products that will work not just with CDMA but with WCDMA and GSM, enabling them to tap all the world’s markets. These don’t even have to reside on a carrier’s network, but can be remotely hosted by handset manufacturers and third party application service providers.” [ABI Research]

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