Cellular Location-as-a-Service: A New Revenue Stream For Carriers?

Most mobile network operators (MNOs) are experiencing declining average revenue per user (ARPU) as increasing competition and regulation have resulted in lower prices for voice calls. This factor, along with limited subscriber growth potential in regions where mobile phone subscription penetration is high, has increasingly led MNOs to focus on value-added services for generating revenue. These services include location-based services (LBS) that have been part of many MNOs’ service portfolios to enable traditional handset applications like navigation.

Since these first services, the gradual advancement of cellular positioning technologies has brought about major improvements in accuracy, reliability, and the services that can be delivered. These advances, combined with a steadily rising number of IoT devices, have led to LBS being deployed for applications like asset tracking, public bicycle tracking, and UAVs.

Value-added location services are often provided with help from third-party location algorithm providers that use wholesale location data or cellular-based solutions to offer services across networks and countries. As an example, network equipment vendors might provide a cellular positioning algorithm to an MNO, and thereafter MNOs are able to use the network, cloud, and data centers to enable IoT services such as smart bicycle management when devices are equipped with cellular ICs, modules, and APIs. For this reason, companies like Ericsson and Huawei are beginning to offer increasingly high accuracy cellular positioning methods with an IoT focus.

Smart bicycle management is just one application, however, and collaboration between companies throughout the cellular value chain is beginning to take place in order to create the necessary ecosystem to enable additional applications that would have traditionally relied on GNSS. For example, chipset and module vendors like Sequans are collaborating with virtual location platform providers like PoLTE to develop next-generation positioning solutions specifically for the IoT. There are a number of advantages to be gained when reliance on GNSS is reduced in IoT devices, including improved indoor capabilities.

Whereas positioning using GNSS leads to increased costs, size, and energy consumption for the sole purpose of location, cellular positioning aims to eliminate these barriers by utilizing only LTE or LPWAN radio technologies for both indoor and outdoor location capabilities by improving energy efficiency and lowering overall device costs. Many IoT devices require cellular connectivity to communicate with and send data to the cloud anyway, making it logical that these devices should integrate location services over the same network. A portion of the energy saved as a result of devices being less reliant on GPS can then be used to power other useful electronic hardware like additional sensors. Sensor data can then work in tandem with location data to provide even more value for the end customer.

Once MNOs start to build up the number of IoT devices they offer location services to, there is the additional potential for new services to be created from the vast amounts of data that can be collected, both in the form of pure location information and the combined additional environmental parameters like temperature, pressure, or humidity that can be gathered from attached sensors. Some of these value-added services could include IoT analytics platforms, geographic information systems(GIS), or sharing economy services. Because these new services are simply leveraging data that will already be available to MNOs, the creation of these new services can be achieved for little to no additional cost.

The future may also experience the integration of indoor and outdoor positioning, which will facilitate seamless machine-to-machine (M2M) communication across verticals that have previously had limited interaction with each other. For example, indoor smart metering data could be combined with connected car data in order to optimize heating as someone arrives home, or geo-fences could be created to track when assets move from indoors to outdoors. These are just some potential applications that previously would not have been possible with GNSS due to its line-of-sight requirements.

ABI Research believes that location-as-a-service creates new opportunities for both the customer and the MNO. The initial investment for the customer is lowered and better tailored price models can be offered, making it easier for the MNO to sign new customers, save costs, and increase customer loyalty. A number of these market opportunities are discussed in an upcoming ABI Research report Wide-Area Network Positioning.