As mobile operators prepare to roll out a new wave of advanced location-based services, IMS isn't just along for the ride — it's the driver. In comparison to previous LBS offerings for the enterprise market (like fleet tracking) and the consumer sector (like child tracking), these new IMS-enabled location solutions do more than simply pinpoint the whereabouts of a person, place or thing — they greatly expand the spectrum of how users will interact with friends, family and colleagues, as well as the larger world around them.

“When you use a mobile phone, location plays a key role — most of the time, you're mobile with your handset, but lots of times you don't exactly know where you are when you're driving around in different areas,” said Sunit Lohtia, CTO of software developer Autodesk's location services division. “Carriers are now looking at ways to automate that process where the user doesn't need to know where he is, and at the same time deliver services based on his location. When you have an accurate location of the user, there are several enhanced services you can provide, like finding nearby gas stations, finding nearby restaurants or finding nearby friends. The key thing that's happening right now is that location is starting to play as an enabler, rather than a service itself.”

As it does across the breadth of mobile applications, IMS will enable compatibility for standards-based location services between a range of devices from different vendors, effectively expanding the customer base for operators planning to deliver proprietary LBS solutions while offering subscribers a more seamless experience. In enabling LBS applications to interoperate with the Internet, IMS promises carriers and subscribers alike a suite of new location services that will make existing LBS applications seem as primitive as a trail of breadcrumbs by comparison.

“Location in an IMS framework plays a pivotal role in terms of enabling services,” said John Trembley, director of telecom and networking at software vendor TimesTen. “The home subscriber system, which is really a cornerstone of the IMS architecture, tracks all your subscriber information, which includes location. Location is critical in identifying and capturing subscribers that are roaming in and out of different mobile switching centers and different networks — it plays a very important role in understanding where you are on the network and how to extend your services, and will enable all your services, no matter where you are in the world.”

And while many of these new services still reside on the proverbial drawing board, the completion of IMS standards and architectures should prove to be all it takes to put location on the map.

“In IMS right now, more things are being defined in the core of the network — they're trying to define streaming servers and get 3GPP-compliant devices on the market,” Lohtia said. “But that technology is coming to market, and in the next year or two more time will be spent on integrating on the services level than on the technology level. Location will be a big part of it.”

In essence, IMS-enabled location solutions will open up a broad new menu of mobile communications by delivering presence and availability information that tells users not only where they are, but also who — not just what — is around them.

“Most things are happening between user-to-user location services, rather than point-of-interest location services,” Lohtia said. “How many times are you going to say ‘What Chinese restaurants are around me?’ compared to ‘Where's my wife?’ If you look at a society, it's all about communication — you want to communicate with your friends, you want to communicate with your family, you want to communicate with your colleagues and you want to communicate with people around you. Location will play a key role — if you find your friend is close by, you can say ‘Hey, let's go grab a drink.’”

IMS also promises to deliver more contextual solutions that not only determine a user's location but aslo which types of applications best complement that particular setting. “When you start to look at the more advanced features you see within a voice-ever-IP network and you look at things like call routing, location is the key to understanding that.” Trembly said. “Whether I'm sitting at my home, sitting in the office or in transit in my car, understanding my location will have a drastic impact on how you create value-added services. More and more, you're going to see in the context of IMS service providers tapping into location information and marrying it to presence and advanced call-routing solutions.”

IMS will also enable LBS to work in concert with emerging multimedia technologies to deliver information in a more compelling manner. “IMS will provide more rich content and multiple content types like video streaming and audio streaming,” Lohtia said. “With IP multimedia, you can download a map of traffic for a particular area, and it can show you the traffic flow. Another good example is that, based on my location, I can learn what theaters are around me, then get a listing of the movies at each theater, then watch a trailer to see what each movie is about. You've given the user a number of choices and done it completely by location.”

Moreover, these new location services will prove as valuable to users traveling to another city as those traveling to another continent. According to Trembley, T-Mobile — an Autodesk customer — is planning to launch a suite of new location services in accordance with the 2006 World Cup, the premier international soccer event that will take place next summer in Germany. He said these new LBS applications will help soccer fans from around the globe navigate their way across Germany regardless of whether they speak the native language.

“Tapping into your location will detect people's location and aid them with more content to orient themselves,” Trembley said. “I could be anywhere in Germany, and I might need a cab but don't know where I am or even speak the language. The key with IMS is you can open that up — you could use your cell phone to contact a taxi organization, they would know your location, and a taxi would be dispatched. And if a service provider is smart, they'll charge on a per-transaction basis for those kinds of value-added services — it would be a great way for them to drive ARPU.”

While much of the attention seems to focus on the consumer sector, new enterprise-targeted applications — traditionally, the foundation of the LBS market — are in progress as well. “On the enterprise side, we're seeing a different set of services more related to mobile resource management,” Lohtia said. “Since most drivers already have cell phones, why not use those phones as GPS devices? It's no longer a tracking system for just cop cars, ambulances and taxis — you have expanded that to people like your sales force, so you can track a salesperson in the field and manage them much better.”

But the true value lies not only in what all of these new services deliver but — equally important — how and when they're delivered. “It's not very valuable to offer some kind of traffic alert system if it takes 10 minutes to trigger an alert that's based on what your location was 10 minutes ago,” Trembley said. “The more instantaneous these systems are, then the better off you're going to be.”

But like so many next-generation mobile services, the biggest roadblock facing these new location solutions is operators' frustrating refusal to accelerate interoperability between their rival networks, which (as the painfully slow rollout of SMS and later MMS interoperability has shown) severely hampers customer adoption and use.

“IMS is the great promise of interoperability, but we have to see how service providers actually implement it,” Trembley said. “IMS is an evolution — it's not something you just go buy at the corner store. Sharing parameters like location and presence are going to be key drivers behind new services, but it all goes only so far if [carriers] don't interoperate that information.”

But given how long it took U.S. carriers to agree on SMS and MMS interop, don't hold your breath. “[IMS is] a great concept, but it's going to take quite some time for the evolution of that architecture to permeate across all the carriers,” said Greg Santoro, vice president of products and services at Nextel Communications. “You're seeing elements of it slowly adopted into networks today, but it's going to take time for IMS to gain a full foothold with carriers and to have the service integration that is one of the promises of that architecture.”

Some developers are nevertheless announcing IMS-based solutions in the here and now. In March, advanced voice services developer Kodiak Networks premiered its new Real-Time Exchange system, which features integrated IMS capabilities such as presence and availability.

“The promise of IMS is ubiquitous communications, and we want to bring that same kind of ubiquity to our solution,” said Bruce Lawler, Kodiak's co-founder and vice president of business development. “The whole reason that voice is as expansive as it is, is that anyone you know, you can call. As soon as you limit that, you've taken a step back. That's why our products allow you to reach out to anyone. We're showing operators you can have IMS functionality today, with future-proof migration.”

Another potential point of concern is user privacy — just because location services can triangulate your whereabouts doesn't mean everyone wants to be found. Nor do they necessarily want text-message coupons and premiums spamming their handsets every time they're in close proximity to a McDonalds or Starbucks shop.

“Unless you make these services user-friendly and all opt-in, people won't use them,” Trembley said. “They'll feel like their privacy is being invaded, so you have to make sure people have the kinds of safeguards they're comfortable with. And you have to make these services user-friendly — if it takes a Ph.D. in engineering to change your settings, it's not going to work.”

But assuming those impediments will be overcome, the potential for LBS and IMS is undeniable — in many respects, IMS looms as the anti-killer apps, enabling operators to cheaply and efficiently deliver ARPU-driving services targeted not at the entire wireless subscriber population but at small yet lucrative customer segments.

“The cool thing about IMS is that you can roll out tons of small-scale applications — for this segment, do this; for that segment, do that; and for these types of customers, offer this,” Trembley said. “You can end the life of these things very quickly: For a while, this is what you do, and when that event is over, you reallocate the resources to some other application. If service providers architect their IMS properly, they'll be able to cater to all sorts of people and do it cost effectively.”