Since the early days, developments in both the mobile communications industry and the location services sector have come a long way. The issues that once challenged widespread adoption of these new sources of revenue and market differentiation have been resolved. However, new issues have inevitably arisen that now must be addressed.

Old models of location service architectures betrayed their telecommunications heritage in being overly rigid and too prescriptive in terms of the interfaces, services and business ideas that they were designed to support. While they may have been presented as an essential glue to hold the new services together, many operators found themselves locked into fossilized approaches that were difficult and expensive to re-engineer in the face of whole scale industry change.

A far more realistic model to adopt in the face of today's pressures should be oriented around the idea of a peer-to-peer model, easily adaptable to deal with new handset, network and application partner technologies. Just as with many other areas within the "industry previously known as telecommunications," location services are no longer based around the idea of a single, straightforward, bi-lateral value chain. Instead, the creation and delivery of truly compelling location services to the end user will involve integrated access to many network facilities simultaneously.

While standards will remain important, it should also be recognized that these are often more accurately "discovered" than imposed, evolved and adopted as a result of real world pressures, rather than through a top-down process. Standardization processes are still extremely vulnerable to pressure from large vendors with their own particular interests to support, and for mobile service providers these factors can in turn limit their own freedom to innovate and respond rapidly to threats and opportunities.

Just as with location applications and the end customer, there is no single, preconceived system that is suitable for all service providers in all parts of the world. Instead, the optimum strategy must be to use an open architecture and platform that is capable of uniting and integrating different features and functions in a highly distributed way to create a rich variety of different value propositions for an extremely diverse customer audience.

It is for this reason that TCS has developed its Voyager^TM distributed architecture, merging the three cornerstones of the next stage in mobile services - messaging, location and content access - into one consistent, coherent and ultimately flexible whole.