The telecom industry in India, as in the rest of the world, is currently surging a record high in power and reach and witnessing a burgeoning of allied technologies. Mobile devices have reached the lowest common social denominator acquiring millions of new subscribers every month. With the progressive subscriber not satisfied with mere voice communication, their increasing demand for more value-added, multimedia-rich data exchange has led to a virtual war among telecom companies for a broader radio frequency 3G spectrum to support such content. One happy outcome of this situation is the dissemination of relevant information that is made accessible with mobile devices through the mobile network by using the location information of the mobile device and the recent developments are positive indicators.

Personal navigation devices (PND) have gained considerable amplitude in India. With more private firms offering advanced features in the PNDs, such as MapMyIndia Navigator and SatGuide, while keeping the costs affordable, the corporate competition is leveraged to consumer advantage.

India's state-owned telecom giant, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd. (BSNL) is the first operator to launch LBS on Telenity's Canvas® LES, Location Enabling Server. Catching up with the latest innovations in the industry, the enterprise will now offer real time fleet and asset management,friend finder alerts, location based advertisement, and location based chatting service. Capitalizing on the rich and varied language base in India, Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd (MTNL) is offering multilingual short messaging service (SMS) in 11 regional languages. This vibrant layout is generating tremendous interest for giant internet portals, such as MSN, who are investing in the Indian telecom companies to provide location-based search.

Bharti Airtel Limited, one of India's leading private sector providers of telecommunications, joined Fixed-Mobile Convergence Alliance (FMCA) to share the developments in convergence of fixedline and mobile wireless technologies such that they can seamlessly blend all the services they have to offer over a unified framework. This Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) will thus enable the service provider to become a one-stop shop for purchase as well as support. For FMC to make subscriber-centric multiple offerings a closer reality, broadband and Wi-Fi networks need to be aggressively expanded, and the process of its entry in India has already started with Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) framing the last recommendations for 3G spectrum services.

In addition to technological developments, policy level developments have been taking place in parallel setting up India as a global player in the industry. One of the recent landmark developments is the New Map Policy brought out by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India, which promises better access to the maps generated by Survey of India. Survey of India is the central agency in charge of surveying, publishing, maintaining and dissemination of the topographic map database of the country. Although encumbered by a few regulatory issues, it is nonetheless a significant step forward in the direction of making all new Open Series maps to be made available in the public domain.

Another conducive development has been the recent reclassification of GPRS phones by the Central Board of Excise and Customs as radio navigational devices incurring a reduced excise of 4%, going back on their earlier classification as satellite phones which incured an import tariff of 34%. Although this development makes it difficult to keep the cost of GPS applications on standalone units affordable in a price-sensitive economy, LBS providers dependent on GPS have worked around this impediment to their advantage by bundling GPS with GPRS phones. A GPS-enabled mobile device, essentially a GPRS phone, now becomes affordable by including GPS as a 'valueadded' offering (a secondary feature), thus doing away with the additional 34% taxes. Ashutosh Pandey, Managing Director, SiRF India speaks to Coordinates in July 2007: "In doing so, the government gave relief to the privileged - those that could afford to purchase a mobile phone costing more that 20,000 Rupees. At the same time, it kept the much needed products in the census, safety, security, and even pure navigational category at the high rate of duty (34%), out of reach of average users".

In a culture-vibrant and language-rich country, such as India, all technology is subject to cultural and linguistic nuances. This is a friendly nation where a mere act of seeking navigation assistance help is a welcome mode of social interaction and any attempt introducing technology as a replacement amounts to bringing about a cultural change. Add to that the variety of Indian languages and dialects that technology has to cater to reach a critical mass. Consequently, it becomes a mammoth task to arrive at a common conventional nomenclature for addresses of locations which may run into several long words, given the Indian propensity to name their roads after their heroes and leaders. Besides, most roads that have a formal name and a commonly used name do not make the task of nomenclature any easier..

By virtue of the booming economy and real estate, there are several new retail outlets, multiplexes, apartment complexes, highcapacity bus and rail ways springing up even as we speak. Extremely systematic and methodical procedures need to be in place to record and update the increasingly volatile topography. This entails a very high cost of investment and maintenance of equipment used to document and update geographic data. Besides, being expensive, LBS is a fancy technology targeted more towards the upper middle class, who are most likely to have drivers who are expected to know the way.

LBS technology comes with its own array of inherent imperfections, which, if not appropriately guarded, may transform itself into a certain invasion of locationrelated personal privacy. The knowledge of a certain satellite constantly tracking and monitoring one's movement is as unnerving as the knowledge of that information being used by analysts to predict behavioral patterns and by advertisers to interpret consumer preferences. Such technology may restrict or dictate movement, a phenomenon lucidly termed as 'geoslavery'. Countries, such as the US, which are extremely sensitive to the concept of personal freedom, may be able to avoid the most serious abuses of this technology, but it may take a little longer for India to enforce stringent laws to protect personal privacy.

2008 holds a promising future for the LBS industry as seen by the major portals and corporations looking for business opportunities in India. Portal providers, such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN have placed location at the core of their offers pairing communication services with maps and local mobile search and mobile advertising. On the other hand, individual vendors are using locationbased services to turn mobile search services into profitable value propositions.

"We are developing an ecosystem of players in the LBS and navigation space - software and solution providers, mobile operators, handset manufacturers, automobile companies and PND manufacturers, to offer consumers high quality and pan India LBS applications . on the internet, on the mobile phone, and in-car." Says Mr Rakesh Verma, CEO, MapMyIndia, CE Systems It is a win-win situation where customers will have more personalized information and network operators will address discreet market segments based on different service portfolios. In the US, the Enhanced 911 (E911) requirements enforced by the Federal Communications Commission was primarily responsible for propelling LBS, and later, the car and aircraft navigation experimented with and embraced the technology. In India, the fondness for information and the fascination with social networking appears to be the driving force behind the popularity of LBS. Opening up a few policies, tightening a few others, and pairing up location information with emergency services, as did E911, may perhaps be just the catalyst that is required to bring LBS in India into the mainstream.So the next time Jack and Jill fall from a hill, they will know exactly how close the nearest hospital is as well as the directions down to the last mile and around the nearest corner.