The Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA), the industry association focused on driving the next generation Wi-Fi experience, has published a whitepaper supporting the deployment of Wi-Fi location based services (LBS) detailing the business drivers and opportunities for the technology. The penetration of Wi-Fi on mobile devices and proliferation of Wi-Fi networks makes it a key technology for enabling and offering location services, particularly indoors and within venues. Its adoption across prominent verticals is leading innovation in many new services and revenue opportunities.
LBS over Wi-Fi opens up a wide range of new possibilities for location based services, analytics, and advertising in markets such as retail, hospitality, enterprise, public venues, entertainment, and emergency services. The technology presents an opportunity for innovation and competitive advantage for service providers, as well as for mobile device, infrastructure, operating system and application vendor’s end users. Emphasising the importance of this topic in the Wi-Fi ecosystem, contributions to this whitepaper have been made by a wide range of ecosystem partners, including operators and service providers, as well as network equipment, roaming solution and chipset vendors.
“The WBA 2014 Industry Report clearly indicated that LBS over Wi-Fi is seen by service providers as one of their most important monetisation strategies. LBS are expanding far beyond traditional areas such as navigation to include a range of commercial services. Utilising carrier-grade Wi-Fi technology to power these services presents innovative opportunities for vendors, consumers and service providers alike,” says Shrikant Shenwai, CEO of the Wireless Broadband Alliance. “This is a further illustration of how Wi-Fi is continuing to evolve beyond connectivity, to enable a wide range of value-added services”.
The report offers a number of conclusions and recommendations, e.g. standards and certification have become essential for LBS over Wi-Fi in order to have scalable and interoperable solutions that the industry can quickly ramp up for the rapidly expanding LBS market.
The WBA’s whitepaper, Location Based Services over Wi-Fi, outlines the following:
- Business drivers
- Wi-Fi LBS ecosystem
- Market opportunities
- Overview of LBS technologies
- Key LBS use cases
- LBS standard solutions and certification
- Industry challenges
To download the whitepaper, please visit: www.wballiance.com/category/wba-releases
LBS will be one of the topics covered at the WBA’s Wi-Fi Global Congress London this year. For further details and to register your interest, please visit: www.wballiance.com/wi-fi-global-congress-london-2015
