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UK Cross-Carrier Cell-ID Location Access (Revisited)

Socialight's volunteered views to psfk for their work in enabling UK cross-carrier Cell-ID Location cooperation needed for Mobile Social Networking, highlights the first rule non-exclusive need for LBS wares to traverse networks. Case in point—traffic transparency that we see today in the US and globally for SMS and MMS, but lacking for Location traffic.

For those unfamiliar with this UK Location history, carriers gathered together, identified a cooperative need for wholesale, and decided to collectively expose their data at different prices. What followed was an explosive build of start-ups launching what each marketed as cross-carrier LBS 'partnerships' and wholesale pricing claims towards innovation. Due credit however in reality belongs to Parliament and advocates, rather than to app providers still piggy-backing on the accomplishment. 

The below is a sample output of the initial effort, which today now seems like a bloated set of pricing for a commodity - one which US carriers still resist to offer up collectively. 

O2  Vodafone 
Monthly VolumeTransaction Price Monthly VolumeTransaction Price
0 - 100K£0.075 0 - 100K£0.088
100K - 250K£0.065 100K - 250K£0.075
250K - 500K£0.055 250K - 500K£0.069
500K - 1M£0.045 500K - 1M£0.063
     
T-Mobile   Orange 
Monthly VolumeTransaction Price Monthly VolumeTransaction Price
0 - 100K£0.095 0 - 100K£0.062
100K - 250K£0.085 100K - 250K£0.060
250K - 500K£0.075 250K - 500K£0.058
500K - 1M£0.065 500K - 1M£0.055

Reader Comments (2)

As the oldest and largest aggregator of location in the UK I can assure you that it was not the operators getting together to decide to collectively sell location - we asked them to do it 8 years ago. We started with an identical service that ran on Vodafone and O2. We then asked to use the same short code for the service regardless of the operator. Legal negotiations took months but we got there eventually. Orange and T-Mobile followed quickly afterwards. The pricing you displayed is much lower than it was initially. O2 were 12p a look up at the start!
11-7-2007 | Unregistered CommenterSteve Page
If there weren't so many UK LBS app providers claiming similar credit, we would trust yours, Steve, particularly since in this case I might believe it's credible as I never actually sat in on said sessions :-)

Unfortunately, the only proofs I have are dozens of other UK LBS app providers all making similar public claims. Perhaps we’ll all accept this as a piece of undocumented telecom-LBS history lost in time. …Too bad as well as it’s a really important global milestone and achievement that other closed-minded carrier-communities should follow.
11-7-2007 | Registered CommenterJonathan Spinney

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