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11th February 2003

Mobile data services have for sometime now have been getting a bad 'rap'. It was only one year ago, that the Wall Street Journal even had an article sub-titled, "WAP is c**p". It would be fair to say that the Wall Street Journal sensed the mood of the average WAP end-user.

And yet the cellular operators are making slow but steady progress on the mobile data promise. Mobile data now represents 16% of total cellular service revenues, up from 6% in 2000. That is around US$2.5 billion in the UK alone. UK cellular CEOs confidently predict surpassing 25% in 2005. Premium SMS makes up 20~30% of text revenues and WAP contributed 1~4% of data revenues. And with a little bit of help from location-based services, cellular operators might just deliver on that promise.

"Using even lower accuracy location technology, like cell ID, operators are starting to get the right content, in the right format, at the right time to the user", said Jamie Moss, a Senior Consultant at Concise Insight. "From our own primary research, we have established that a total of 133 location-based services from 38 networks were commercially available within Europe's top 15 cellular markets at the end of 4Q-2000."

In Concise Insight's review of the present status of Europe's Location-Based Services market, tangible, concrete research and insight has been gathered for each and every operational LBS for 51 operators.

"European cellular operators are by no means out of the woods", said Jake Saunders, Partner. "LBS will not be a panacea for 3G but there are indications that Vodafone's Live!, KPN's i-Mode, and Hutchison 3G's service will use location technology and applications to make their mobile data services that little bit more special."

Across Western Europe, location-based services contributed a meager US$133 million to the cellular operators' bottom-line but given the current activity and increasing operator commitment, location-based service could help WE operators pull in an annual US$7.6 billion by 2009. A number of bottlenecks have held back the LBS market-place, such as feature-'limited' handsets, unimaginative applications, uncertainty over long-term technology options and a lack of direction to resolving international location-based roaming. If these hurdles could be overcome, the future would look even rosier for LBS.