Open Exposure of Telco Capabilities - Identification of Critical Success Factors for Location-Based Services in Open Telco

As of late, open exposure of telco capabilities has been a target of interest - much due to the success of open application programming interfaces on the Internet services market. Due to the innate ability of the mobile networks to know its users´ locations, the location-based services market is an especially interesting area from the operator point of view. Operators could possibly create success in this market by implementing the Open Telco framework; however, key service areas and critical success factors have not been identified yet. This paper reviews the existing literature on Open Telco, location-based services, and network-based positioning technologies and identifies the key location-based service application areas for network-based positioning. Based on this analysis, we present a list of critical success factors for location-based services in Open Telco. The findings indicate that the key application areas in network-positioning based location-based services are social networking, information, and productivity services. The critical success factors were found to be standard interfaces, operator cooperation, and the handling of privacy, security, as well as usability issues with location-based services.