P1348

SPEED:  Strengthening Telco's Position in the Mobile Presence and Location aware services European Interoperability for new market opportunities
closed

Telcos are among the most important players on Location awareness services, as their network infrastructure and services provide the location information. Nevertheless a lack in the standardization on interoperability has limited the development of this business.

Location related information is mostly needed in unfamiliar environment that often is in roaming situations. Current standards do not cover yet how the comprehensive location based service (LBS) works in a roaming scenario from the location related information source to adaptable location aware service provision.

Current implementations of LBS, no matter how simple they are, show that these services have the potential to be successful. Person to person communication where location and presence awareness is applied is also been analyzed as a big business opportunity. Nevertheless LOCAWA (P1208) and Mobile Presence (P1204) projects have identified key-issues that compromise the development of this business:

• Both mobile presence and location awareness applications need to be seamless  accessible through any kind of network and while roaming

• Interoperability, and coherent basics format for presentation are needed

• Privacy and security: customers need to feel that their privacy is not jeopardised in any way, even when roaming in a foreign operators’ network.

Therefore the study will give answers to how interoperability can be managed for mobile presence and location aware services, and what new business and market opportunities this will enable.

Telcos, with their strong position in the value chain for Location awareness services, should play the major role to define Location aware services.

What are the main objectives of this Project?

• Elaborate a selection of business models for location awareness services as a way to develop European LBS services,

• Propose solutions for interoperability, security, and content management with third parties,

• Include person-to-person services which use advanced communication techniques like MMS,

• Specify the requirements of interoperability for roaming: Network roaming, SLAs, presentation of content,

• Analyze and describe the necessary work to be followed at European legal and standardization instances, e.g. creating an ETSI Specific Task Force, and

• Propose further activities, e.g. follow up European projects.

What are the key results for this Project?

The key results are:

• Business cases,

• Detailed European Market analysis for LBS,

• Mobile Presence and new Awareness applications

What relationship exists to other organisations or bodies?