VAS, when we talk about it in Indian context the first thing that comes to our mind is SMS. I always wonder why one cannot associate it with GPRS ?
Supporters of SMS might argue by saying that its easy to use but my point is that the premium one is paying for making our life easier is not worth it!! Downloading a ringtone of size 50kb would have costed me 50 paisa and I actually paid 30 times more!! The painful part is that a substantial part of it goes to service providers which, I think can be easily avoided if one takes GPRS route.
Yes SMS is omnipresent but these days number of GPRS compatible phones are not less. One can get it for 4K or even less. All we need to do is to spread awareness and thats what I did in this post.
One can talk about lack of killer applications but then who is supposed to develop one, someone from us of course.Lack of infrastructure can again be one of the reasons but thats because low GPRS traffic. Its pretty obvious that we are in a deadlock situation. The only way out is to start from any one point and others will connect automatically.
I have been part of GPRS Vs SMS quite a few times, unfortunately nothing concrete came out of it. The reason could have been absence of quantity/quality of people or lack of understanding. This time I intend to bring all those who have got to anything with VAS under one roof i.e. this blog 
.
I request all the readers to help me in serving the common cause and I of course take the responsibility of collating the entire information. I declare house open for the debate
P.S. FYI, VAS India 2007 is scheduled on 6th of this month.
Comparing VAS and GPRS is like comparing two worlds.
Both got its own advantages and disadvantages
The problem with GPRS I observed is, it is difficult to develop on single exe.
There are no standard screen sizes, or display parameters or font, pictures, even pictures act differently on different phone. Though there are phones with GPRS for 4K.
It is not with all the people.
SMS is standardized. One solution will work in all phones. I don’t have to worry phone make, modal. A layman also knows how to read a sms.
Hi Kesav,
Thats a concern but then few people have worked on it and have come up with easy-to-use solution. To know more about this all you need to do is refer my this post on WALL,
http://sumitramani.wordpress.com/2007/06/28/the-wall/
Hi Sumit,
I am also in the camp against high-cost on SMS for special purposes. This is one thing which is keeping mobile VAS to take its full-avtar.
I think your right in saying that GPRS is a better medium of availing VAS. With better mobrosers and applet viewers coming in, we have reached quite a good level of standardization with look and feel of GPRS apps.
In india, there is a huge pouplation, who are having GPRS enbled phones, but go to cyber cafe’s for accessing net. Its a mix situation of lack of awareness and lack of ‘pay per use’ charging model for GPRS.
But I do believe, that GPRS and related standards would change the way people perceive mobile VAS.
Lalit
SMS and GPRS are the mere bearer that is used for providing the value added service for a consumer. With SMS being (I wonder why USSD has not taken a similar path as SMS for the bearer in GSM network), ubiquitously available in all the handsets and not all handsets provide option to load a client, I presume VAS providers, are going for SMS. However with more and more operators trying to load some kind of client (be it based on Java/BREW/STK), I would think SMS/USSD (in GSM) or some proprietary data protocol (e.g., TTSL is using CellRadio) would be used. But I also don’t think GPRS (or EDGE) can not be ignored for a long time.
Also I am not sure whether all the SMS cost would go to operator… May be some percentage of it would be shared with the VAS provider.
Hi ,
My assumption is that the operator is happy with the ammount of profit that it is getting with SMS and hence there is no reason for it to promote GPRS. Also probably cost of deploying VAS over SMS is far less than deploying services over GPRS. Moreover whatever said the customers seems to be willing to pay the price asked by the operators so why should the operators try something else.
As an example I have noticed there is less noise/buzz about the mobile IM ( which is over GPRS and which could kill SMS ) launched by the INdian operators than it is for the ringtones and other VAS services.
“Downloading a ringtone of size 50kb would have costed me 50 paisa”
You are considering only the cost of transport, not the cost of the content. Premium SMS exists so that content providers can charge for the content. To me PSMS is simply a billing mechanism – the actual delivery can be done via GPRS or SMS. I consider premium SMS a key driver for the ringtone market – else mobile music would be plagued by piracy the same way online music is today.
GPRS has a huge potential for VAS. The first and foremost being that it is operator independant. Just like a webserver, I can put a machine on a public IP and host an application on that. It is all visible to the operator just as mere GPRS traffic. I dont need to put any hardware or software in the operator’s infrastructure.
Now, coming to the application protocol, the OMA PoC and XDM provide a rich set of standardized protocols and their extensions. It has defined standards for session establishment, contact management, document management, etc. It can easily replace SMS with voice based messaging. There are several companies coming up with interesting applications on the top of PoC. Several handset vendors will soon come up with OMA PoC built into the handsets. Till then, OMA PoC software is available for Symbian and WinMobile platforms from several vendors.
The first application coming up on OMA PoC is short voice communication, voice messaging, group calls, server based contact management, presence, etc. But the OMA PoC can be used as the platform to develop a lot of compelling applications for both the enterprise and consumer. You can check http://www.mobilesforworkers.com for a glimpse of what is already available.
Also GPRS is only for GSM carriers and not for CDMA whereas SMS is available even for CDMA carriers. So the other route is to offer the same through WAP. Comments.
I do feel GPRS opens up a lot more possibilities and opportunities than SMS but the user base is very small. But it does seem that major providers will bring the user cost to minimal (or is it already quite low?) and then these services will kick off the next VAS boom. As far as SMS is concerned, it will be difficult to replace few services like ones which are used for alerting or notifying a user about specific events because of the push nature of SMS. But SMS has its own issues of character limits and high cost.
I agree about GPRS is better option to send SMS, but whole point is reach to mass public. Today millions of handsets are in circulation that can only do SMS. Above all there is a demand of Low cost phone , example Reliance has sold Rs 777 phone in Millions of unit.
Looking at the above scenario, why Operator will invest in additional cost of deploying SMS over GPRS, unless there is significant increase in revenue.
It will really takes a long time when GPRS over SMS can become reality.
i believe any content that has to flow , that is gprs dependent , needs to flow today , thru the operators.
hence , Operator dependent…
my Question to Gokulmuthu N , how would the billing be managed …. how would you collect your due for content flowing on gprs , even if you say you deliver it independently.
how would you distribute the content …the subscriber base addressing .
the operators are talking about Gprs … adverts like eskimo search on gprs, with hutch, at least is openng up acceptability and realisation that VAS has more to offer than plain sms.
what about single applicatin developers , who is gonna give them a platform, and a piece of the cake, say for example , if its a simple compress sms application, send 2 sms collapsed in one !! would the operator want to loose the addn sms revenue he earns if the charactes of one sms exceeds the limit.
i am sorry to deviate on the discussion of sms being the king , but gprs is a way ahead, rich media, video messaging , the works …. what lacks is the knowledge and the hand holding that the subscribers need .
http://www.bugzy.in
Hi guys,
The points that have been made so far are quite correct except the fact we are not going to the root of problem or we are not coming up correct solution/business models.
I believe we need to understand the philosophy of having a channel over which VAS would be made viable: SMS and data connectivity(GSM-GPRS/CDMA data calls).
As correctly stated by most of us here, both SMS and GPRS have its own pros and cons.The BEST opinion that have come out from this listing is that SMS is blocking the GPRS evolution, thanks to the revenue-savvy(ONLY) operators.If we think ahead, its unlikely that their existence is mutually exclusive.
SMS wins in scenarios where data is limited,delay tolerant,etc. whereas GPRS/data connectivity wins where volume is more and needed real-time.
Hence for the evolution of data connectivity beyond just SMS,wot do we need to do?
I think this is the question we need to address.
Voice call revenues have reached the end and lived its life.The next level of differentiation between the operators is in the specialized service and data call……enters the data call and the packet applications.Over to you guys!!!!
Good to hear from all of you. I would prefer to wait for few more comments before putting it in back burner
. So guys the house is still open for discussion…