In-Stat: Wireless Location Services for Businesses Could Top 1 Million Subscribers by 2010

According to a new report from In-Stat, "depending largely on the cellular operators’ actions, the US Location-Based Services (LBS) business market is forecast to grow to from 582,000 to 1.1 million subscribed devices by the end of 2010." In-Stat believes "Location-enabled enterprise applications constitute a small but important segment of the market for mobile IT applications."

Allyn Hall at In-Stat said, "The forecast for enterprise location-enabled applications using handsets depends on how carriers and applications vendors sort out how they will market these applications and how to structure the billing relationship. In addition, the availability of handsets that are compatible with location based services is a key factor that depends on marketing and expenditure decisions by carriers.”

Key findings include:

• The largest market is legacy black box applications, which use vehicle-mounted devices.
• The use of cellular handsets equipped with Assisted-Global Position System (A-GPS) chipsets is an emerging market.
• Until mid-2005, only Nextel provided handsets that provide an application execution environment (Java) and GPS data to the applications.