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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Moderated Thread - please read rules before posting -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Biddle who wrote (29064)	11/18/2002 9:35:15 PM
From: John Biddle	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 197716

LBS Out There, But How Big Will It Get? By Wireless Week Staff, November 18, 2002 wirelessweek.com Wireless carriers have deployed a lot of location-based services-equipped handsets to help meet enhanced wireless E911 mandates, but the long-term carrot for investing in LBS always has been the sale of related commercial services and applications. Is that carrot a bit smaller than carriers believe? A new forecast from In-Stat/MDR says it is, and indicates that the size of the commercial LBS market may only total in the millions of dollars of revenue, instead of billions, in the next several years. In what could become a controversial theory, In-Stat (which is owned by the same parent as Wireless Week) says it is highly unlikely that U.S. wireless carriers will achieve break-even on their LBS-related investments - made primarily to comply with the government's wireless E911 mandates, before the end of the decade. 'U.S. wireless carriers should look at every opportunity to find relief from the U.S. government for the costs of complying with the FCC's E911 mandate,' says In-Stat senior analyst Ken Hyers. 'In addition, these carriers should explore applications and services that use LBS and cultivate the developer community to create these applications and services, with the aim of training customers to adopt and use LBS as quickly as possible in order to speed the point at which carriers can begin to see a return on their location investment.' In-Stat expects the market will be slow to grow even though it believes that by 2005, almost every U.S. wireless subscriber will have an LBS-enabled handset. The total addressable LBS market will number 1.3 billion subscribers worldwide by 2006, but most of that growth will take place more than 3-4 years out, the firm forecasts. If it turns out to be accurate, such a forecast can't be good news for carriers, which already have spent significant amounts evaluating E911 technologies and seeding the market with GPS-enabled handsets able to take advantage of location-based network technologies. Qualcomm, for example, today said there are more than 5 million of its own gpsOne-enabled handsets in commercial use in the United States, Korea and Japan, comprising about 30 different available handsets. And Nokia today introduced its new GPS-enabled 3585i phone, a CDMA2000 1X model expected to begin shipping in the first quarter. The phone was one of several Nokia introduced in conjunction with the Comdex technology trade show this week in Las Vegas.