Polaris Aims For 60% LBS Market

California-based Location Based Services (LBS) solution provider Polaris Wireless aims to capture 60-percent of India's location-based solutions market.

"I believe that the total revenue opportunity [budgetary number] for the LBS solutions would be US$500 million (INR 27.8 billion). But that is just the estimate. We hope to capture the 60-percent of whatever is the number," says Srinivas Varadarajan, Vice President, Sales and Business Development, Asia, Polaris Wireless. Polaris offers software-based wireless location solution for operators, application providers and security agencies.

The company says that it has successfully completed field trials with a tier-1 Indian wireless operator's 3G network to prove compliance with Department of Telecommunications.

"Basically we have done three trials, one each in Bangalore, Agartala and Kolkatta, with two of country's top-three operators. While the trial in Bangalore was based on the 2G network, the trials in Kolkata were done to prove our effectiveness in urban 3G networks. We have even done extensive drive testing in the regions," Varadarajan adds.

The company claims that they are the only wireless systems provider to exceed the DoT mandate in all radio-access technologies (2G/3G) across all environments, and hence meeting the required benchmarks.(SeePolaris Locates Growth Opportunity)

Amongst the competition, there are players like Creativity Software, Ericsson AB and CommScope Inc. with whom the company competes.

In a 2011 directive, DoT amended the terms of India's service provider licenses where they are required to provide the location of any customer in their licensed areas for security reasons.

The government had earlier mandated the operators to deploy LBS platforms with location accuracy of 50 meters. However, Cellular Operators Association of India had later raised concerns on the cost of implementation and privacy anxiety of subscribers. The association even said it could not find adequate solutions that worked on both GSM and CDMA networks and sought out government's support for right technology.(SeeLBS: Stuck In A Conflict)

Varadarajan, however, says that he was surprised with the COAI remark and adds that there are multiple vendors who have solutions for both CDMA and GSM networks. "Are they expecting a single vendor, a single solution who could provide for all the technology? Saying that there is no vendor who has been able to give the solution is kind of skewed," he adds.

- Jatinder Singh, Principal Correspondent, Light Reading India