India’s telecom giant BSNL to provide Location-Based Services to mobile customers

Telenity - a provider of converged services platforms and applications for communications networks - provided this service to BSNL, has already done a soft launch in India and the services are being used by the staff of BSNL for the past couple of months. With Telenity’s Canvas LES, BSNL subscribers can easily find, locate or monitor phones and other assets based on their geographic position, points of interest and securely fine-tune their privacy profile on the fly when they want it.

With these subscription-based services one can track their children, make new communities for entertainment, get information about the city or zero in on the nearest service of choice, be it a hospital, police station or even petrol pump.

"As we expand our network, our main goal is to meet the personalisation needs of our fast growing subscriber base. The location-based services solution from Telenity will usher in a new era in telecommunication," says S. Krishnan, General Manager, BSNL.

The service does not require consumers to buy anything extra as long as they subscribe to the LBS service, and promises to change the way people in India use their cell phones.

While the service allows to track people down, privacy of subscribers is of prime concern. "Our converged location and presence solution supports complete and total privacy of location-based services across any network," promises Ashwani Vachher, General Manager, Telenity. To ensure that the services are not misused, the subscriber is given full control over the options. They can choose whether or not to allow a person to track them. The ones who might really benefit though, are transport companies, marketing firms and other organisations who want to track their employees’ whereabouts.

- BSNL
Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) was formed on October 1, 2000. Today, BSNL has a network of over 45 million lines covering 5,000 towns with 43.5 million connections. More information on BSNL is available on the Web at www.bsnl.com.in.

- Telenity
Telenity is a provider of next generation converged services platforms and applications for communications networks. Telenity's IMS compliant converged services solutions include: reusable service delivery and content components enabling rapid service creation, deployment and execution functionalities across multiple services and applications; location and presence servers; integrated messaging solutions; and value added services. For more information visit: www.telenity.com.