Value-added Services

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Introduction
Value-added services (VAS) are unlike core services. They have unique characteristics and they relate to other services in a completely different way. They also provide benefits that core services can not.

Also see: Mobile VAS

Value-added Service Characteristics

About All VAS share the same characteristics: MobileIN.com 1. Not a form of basic service but rather adds value total service offering 2. Stands alone in terms of profitability and/or stimulates incremental demand for core service(s) Join our 3. Can sometimes stand alone operationally email list 4. Does not cannibalize basic service unless clearly favorable 5. Can be an add-on to basic service, and as such, may be sold at a premium price 6. May provide operational and/or administrative synergy between or among other services not merely for diversification Mobile in Minute papers Every VAS will demonstrate one or more of the above characteristics. Furthermore, a value-added service will never stand in stark contrast to any of the above characteristics. 2.5G
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VAS also have a certain time dimension associated with them. Subjectively speaking, a value-added service today becomes a basic service when it becomes sufficiently common place and widely deployed to no longer provide substantive differentiation on a relative

basis.

Relationship to other Services

GPRS Intelligent Agents Inter-operator Messages IWF Lawful Intercept LDAP Location Services Mobile Basics Mobile Instant Messaging Mobile IN Mobile IP MVNO Personal Area Networks Prepay Technology Presence Personalization Positioning Sevice Bureaus Softswitch Smart Cards SMS SS7 SS7 Planning & Engineering Unified Messaging USSD VAS WAP WAP & iMode Wireless 911/112 Wireless Testing WLAN Roaming XML

There are two types of VAS. The first service type are those value-added services that stand alone from an operational perspective. These types of services need not be coupled with other services, but they can be. Many non-voice services fall into this category. They are often provided as an optional service along with voice services, but they could be offered and used by themselves without the voice service. For example, SMS could be offered and used as a service without voice calling. The second, and arguably more numerous and important type of VAS, are those services that do not stand-alone. Instead, this category adds value to existing services. While it seems implicit in the definition of value-added, this is an important principle that makes value-added services stand apart from other services.

Value-added Services Examples

There are many services that could be considered "value-added". For discussion purposes, we will a few of these services below. Push-to-Talk Push-to-Talk (PTT) is a VAS because it:

Drives additional revenue to the wireless carrier, but doe not cannibalize existing revenues Provides differentiated service offerings May be packaged with various other VAS such as MIM to provide even greater value

Call Management Services This type of service can not stand alone as a service. Instead, it adds value to a core service by allowing the subscriber to manage incoming and/or outgoing calls. For example, value-added service interactions occur when the subscriber receives a call. Many call

management services allow the subscriber to establish when, where, and under what circumstances they may be reached by calling parties. This provides value to the core service - voice communications - by way of increased control and flexibility. Depending on the specific commercial situation, this value-added service could be offered as either a premium service (at a premium price) or be bundled with other the core service offering. The benefit of bundling would be to provide a differentiated core service and/or to increase the use of the core service. Location Sensitive Billing This is another example of a service that can not standalone. Instead, location sensitive billing (LSB) adds value to the core service by location enabling the core service. Location sensitive billing can be used in conjunction with post-paid, prepaid, and/or VPN based mobile communications services to establish zones for which differentiated billing treatment may be applied. For example, a "home zone", "work zone", and "premium price zone" could be established to allow an operator to offer differentiated service to its customers. This is viewed as a value-added service to both the customer and the mobile operator. The customer benefits from LSB through his ability to use the mobile phone at preferred rates based on location. The wireless carrier benefits from incremental revenues derived from additional usage and from premium charge zones where there is already high demand and perhaps overly taxed system capacity. While the issue of potential cannibalization of existing service arises, customer behavior and studies indicate a net benefit derived from overall increased usage and revenues. Taken together, call management services and LSB also depict characteristic number six, operational synergy. Call management services add value in terms of providing the user options depending on location. For example, the user may want to receive certain calls at the home zone, but not at work, and perhaps receive only urgent calls when traveling or on vacation. LSB

provides the additional synergistic benefit of location based billing when the user is in those various locations. Mobile Data Services This is an example of a value-added service that does stand-alone. Mobile data services are considered valueadded because they depict many of the characteristics discussed earlier.

Does not cannibalize existing services Can be offered at a premium price Provides differentiation Can provide synergy with basic service

Largely due to the current state of mobile communications evolution, many non-voice services can be considered to be value-added. However, the extent to which additional value-added services can be layered on top of mobile data services will determine the limit of their value. For example, many non-voice services will have even greater value through personalization. Two of the most significant ways to personalize wireless services are through location enabling them and making them personal profile driven. Mobile data services are utilized to obtain information, content, and to perform transactions. All of these activities are more meaningful if they are tailored to the individual. Location based services add value by way of putting the data into a location context for the user. Personal profiles further enhance the value through Personalization.

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Read the book Wireless Intelligent Networking for more information about the core technologies that would enable mobile value-added services.

ntroduction
In this age of significant telecommunications competition, mobile network operators continuously seek new and innovative ways to create differentiation and increase profits. One of the best ways to do accomplish this is through the delivery of highly personalized services. One of the most powerful ways to personalize mobile services is based on location. We will discuss Location Based Services (LBS), but we will first discuss the basis of LBS - location technology.

Location-based Services White Papers Click Here Technology

Positioning
One of the most obvious technologies behind LBS is positioning, with the most widely recognized system being the Global Positioning System (GPS). There are however, other means of positioning in addition to GPS. These other technologies are network based positioning and typically rely on various means of triangulation of the signal from cell sites serving a mobile phone. In addition, the serving cell site can be used as a fix for location of the user.

Positioning & Location Mgt

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Geographic data is an important aspect of any location system. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) provide the tools to provision and administer base map data such as man made structures (streets, buildings) and terrain (mountains, rivers). GIS is

also used to manage pointof-interest data such as location of gas stations, restaurants, nightclubs, etc. Finally, GIS information also includes information about the radio frequency characteristics of the mobile network. This allows the system to determine the serving cell site of the user.

Location Management Function

It is not enough to be able to position the mobile user and know the map data around that position. There must be a location management function to process positioning and GIS data on behalf of LBS applications. The location management function acts as a gateway and mediator between positioning equipment and LBS infrastructure.

Services
Location based information
Many people are familiar with wireless Internet, but many don't realize the value and potential to make information services highly personalized. One of the best ways to personalize information services is to enable them to be location based. An example would be someone using their Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) based phone to search for a

restaurant. The LBS application would interact with other location technology components to determine the user's location and provide a list of restaurants within a certain proximity to the mobile user.

Location based billing

The ability to have preferential billing is provided by this type of application. Through location based billing, the user can establish personal zones such as a home zone or work zone. Through arrangements with the serving wireless carrier, the user could perhaps enjoy flat-rate calling while in the home area and special rates while in other defined zones. This type of application can be especially useful when use in conjunction with other mobile applications such as prepaid wireless.

Emergency services
Hopefully not many readers of this article will have to rely on dialing 9-11 from a mobile phone, but if you do, it is a location based emergency service application that pinpoints your location and relays it the appropriate authorities. The FCC has mandated that by October of 2001, all wireless carriers in the United States must provide a certain degree of accuracy in pinpointing the location of mobile users

who dial 9-1-1.

Tracking
This is a rather large category that contains everything from the difficult fleet applications to enabling mobile commerce. Fleet applications typically entail tracking vehicles for purposes of the owning company knowing the whereabouts of the vehicle and/or operator. Tracking is also an enable of mobile commerce services. A mobile user could be tracking and provided information that he has predetermined he desires, such as notification of a sale on men's suits at a store close to the user's current proximity.

Summary
Location is a strategic asset of wireless carriers. Leveraging this information enables the user to experience value-added services and the mobile network operator to offer differentiation and incremental profitability. See the book Wireless Intelligent Networking for more information about the technology behind LBS and applications.

Mobile Positioning and Location-based Services (LBS) can provide a strong foundation to build Value-aded Services (VAS)

Mobile Positioning and Location Management book More Books: LBS and Positioning (CLICK HERE)

Personalization
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Wholesale Mobile The goal of mobile operators is to increasingly make MobileIN.com Report their service offerings more personalized towards Market their customers. This movement is led by the need to Research differentiate products against fierce competition while Secrets of White Papers driving improved revenue per unit customer. MVNO Training Success

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Enabling Technologies
Most of the emphasis on personalized services today is placed on mobile data services enabled by technologies such as GPRS. However, there are other enabling technologies that are fundamental to enabling personalization itself. The following technologies are not applications themselves, but rather enable applications to be personalized. Personal Profiling This is simply the use of databases and directories to

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store personal preference information with technologies such as LDAP being key for access to the information. Intelligent Agents Intelligent agent technology provides a mechanism for information systems to act on behalf of their users. Specifically, intelligent agents can be programmed to search, acquire, and store information on behalf of the wants and needs of users. They may be used for everything from finding the best sale on a consumer item to watching who is querying the subscriber's profile information, thereby acting as a security agent. Personal Area Networks The ability to create a PAN is crucial to establishing personalization in mobile data applications for use in various applications including wireless mobile commerce. PANs also establish the ability to enable certain presence and location services for voice and data applications. Presence and Location Closely related, presence and location technologies are enablers of personalized services based on the spatial orientation of the user. Presence and availability technologies enable the system to determine when the user is in a certain locale and whether the user is available to engage in certain activities. Location technologies provide even more precise location information, enabling the system to better interact with applications and personal profiles to deliver very targeted services. Presence systems can enable location systems to work even better than they would by themselves by first approximating the location of a user and feeding this information to profiles to determine if better

location information is necessary. Applications Personalization enables advanced, customized services such as alerts, targeted advertising and games, dramatically improved mobile messaging and others. One of the fundamental improvements brought by personalization technology (in conjunction with mobile data technologies) is the ability to provide various push-based applications in which the network autonomously (e.g. no manual, on-demand user interaction) determines whether to push services toward the user. Services may include content, information, and notification of events.

Value-added service
A value-added service (VAS) is a popular telecommunications industry term for noncore services, or in short, all services beyond standard voice calls and fax transmissions. However, it can be used in any service industry, for services available at little or no cost, to promote their primary business. In the telecommunication industry, on a conceptual level, value-added services add value to the standard service offering, spurring the subscriber to use their phone more and allowing the operator to drive up their ARPU. For mobile phones, while technologies like SMS, MMS and data access were historically usually considered value-added services, but in recent years SMS, MMS and data access have more and more become core services, and VAS therefore has beginning to exclude those services. A distinction may also be made between standard (peer-to-peer) content and premiumcharged content. These are called mobile value-added services (MVAS) which are often simply referred as VAS. Value-added services are supplied either in-house by the mobile network operator themselves or by a third-party value-added service provider (VASP), also known as a content provider (CP) such as All Headline News or Reuters. VASPs typically connect to the operator using protocols like Short message peer-to-peer protocol (SMPP), connecting either directly to the short message service centre (SMSC) or, increasingly, to a messaging gateway that gives the operator better control of the content.

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