Potential of cell broadcast technology is really huge in India

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How do you view the cell broadcast market opportunities for VAS vendors and service providers in India? How is the scenario in mature markets?
In many markets, cell broadcast technology has not been used for any commercial applications. In few countries, cell broadcast at present is mainly in use for sending emergency broadcast messages to mass public like flood warnings, traffic forecasts, missing kids information, etc. by public safety agencies. Cell broadcast technology can also play a crucial role in geographical advertisement applications. The potential of cell broadcast technology is really huge, and will see a variety of commercial applications along with emergency applications being launched by the end of 2010.

What are the key concerns in the VAS space for vendors and service providers in India?
Pricing is a big issue for both vendors and service providers in India. Due to lot of competition, the ARPU on VAS is also decreasing for service providers. This directly reflects on VAS infrastructure vendors as well. The key issue and concern for a VAS infrastructure vendor is how to provide highly capable and robust platforms at reasonable price points. Another big issue for vendors and service providers these days is on billing reconciliation with VAS applications and content providers. There are almost 200-500 VAS applications or content providers connecting to VAS infrastructure of service providers. All these VAS applications and content providers work on revenue sharing model. Billing reconciliation needs to be done on a monthly basis.

What do you think would be the next killer VAS application which will have a mass appeal?
With 2.5G and 3G kind of bandwidth coming into play, a multilingual, multi-channel/mode (SMS, GPRS, MMS, CBC), easy-to-use on-device application-that can be used by a ordinary person-will make huge advances in the coming days. The challenge is going to be on how to download this application on to the handset if there is no GPRS/3G connection. The handset manufacturers will have to play a big role, and pre-load these kind of applications when selling in the Indian market. There should not be too much typing, rather by virtue of few clicks, the subscriber should get what he/she wants using that application.

What are the innovations taking place in SMSC generally in VAS space, and in your R&D particularly?
Constant innovation is happening in our SMSCs. The effort is on how to make it more scalable and robust in terms of achieving highest throughput per CPU cycle, flexible architecture to work with multiple billing, IN, MSC, and provisioning vendor platforms, catering to different subscription and content billing without having any revenue leakages. This makes the delivery process more reliable and guaranteed within some time interval, putting together robust and easy to use MIS tools for content/application billing reconciliation. Recently, R&D has started putting in innovative methods of preventing SMS spam, etc.

Kannan K
kannan@cybermedia.co.in