Wireless Location Services for Businesses Could Top 1 Million Subscribers by 2010

In-Stat: Depending largely on the cellular operators’ actions, the US Location-Based Services (LBS) business market is forecast to grow to from 582,000 to 1.1 million subscribed devices by the end of 2010. Location-enabled enterprise applications constitute a small but important segment of the market for mobile IT applications. Applications for this technology include fleet management/dispatch, workforce and sales force management, as well as a variety of public sector location applications. The forecast for enterprise location-enabled applications using handsets depends on how carriers and applications vendors sort out how they will market these applications and how to structure the billing relationship. In addition, the availability of handsets that are compatible with location based services is a key factor that depends on marketing and expenditure decisions by carriers.

• The largest market is legacy black box applications, which use vehicle-mounted devices.

• The use of cellular handsets equipped with Assisted-global Position System (A-GPS) chipsets is an emerging market.

• Until mid-2005, only Nextel provided handsets that provide an application execution environment (Java) and GPS data to the applications.

Location-Enabled Services in the Enterprise Publ 20060412