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Next Location Based Service in IndiaLeslie PresuttiDirector of Product Management QUALCOMM CDMA Technologies
Abstract India, with over a billion people, is one of the fastest growing markets in the world for wireless connectivity and one of the last great frontiers for wireless location-based services. Clearly, the same issues that are being addressed worldwide -- those of social networking, personal safety, enterprise efficiency, geographic information services and asset protection -- are present in India. The challenge remains how to provide compelling value to an Indian population, currently with teledensity of around 11 percent, that will accelerate the migration to not just wireless connectivity but also to key value-added services. The key to creating compelling services for the Indian market lies in identifying high value services and tailoring those services to address unique Indian market requirements. For example, navigation on mobile handsets, one of the most successful location-based services worldwide, is largely customized for automotive use in America while in others, such as Japan, it focuses on mass transit and pedestrian navigation. In India, clearly, there is both significant reliance on mass transit as well as on more individual modes of travel such as automobile and bicycle. Any comprehensive navigation services would need to adapt for the different modes of travel both in the assumptions made and in the services provided. Thus, bus and train schedules and walking/biking transit times are key to pedestrian travel while real time traffic information is much more germane to automotive traffic. Similarly, the high density of businesses and markets and the lack of comprehensive geo-coded directory information makes the provision of useful points of interest services both more challenging and also much more valuable. For example, being able to not only advertise to potential customers but also help them locate the store wirelessly means that having expensive, high traffic store frontage on main streets and thoroughfares is no longer a necessary to driving business and that stores can focus incremental resources on providing better customer value instead. How then do you create reliable location services for a market that shows clear and compelling need for such services? The foundation of such services is clearly based upon reliable, ubiquitous and highly accurate location technology. Services need to work whenever and wherever called upon with a high level of accuracy. As such, many industry experts believe the true potential of the location-based service market lies in the combination of GPS and wireless signals in a mobile handset for a hybrid technology called Assisted-GPS (A-GPS). Already deployed widely in the United States and around the world, A-GPS provides the most accurate, ubiquitously available positioning capabilities available today. Powering the vast majority of location-based services that have been deployed on mobile handsets, A-GPS overcomes many of the challenges of simply relying on GPS satellites alone to extend precise positioning to areas such as dense urban canyons, deep inside buildings, and in other difficult areas.  The potential market for A-GPS location services is enormous, tightly correlated to the expansion of the mobile phone market as a whole as well as growing interest and awareness in mobile applications. As of 2006, the global market for GPS devices is estimated to be worth US$2.3 billion. The Indian market is now at $22 million, but there is potential for growth to $448 million in the next three to four years. GPS companies (both local and international) are competing to grab a piece of this Indian market. Statistics taken from Location 2006 conference While many countries are already nearing the stage where A-GPS is mainstream, India is still in its infancy and as a result, a vast market remains untapped. The Indian government’s positive support for private GPS vendors is helping build healthy competition in this field. A-GPS is Supported Ubiquitously: (Sidebar)
A-GPS is Supported Ubiquitously: (Sidebar)
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