Lucent Technologies and TeleCommunication Systems announced an agreement for Lucent to distribute and resell globally TCS' location-based solutions and applications.

Location-based solutions enable service providers to offer their enterprise and residential customers a broad array of useful new services. For example, a "family finder" service could enable a parent to quickly locate and call other family members. A business could easily coordinate package deliveries and pickups based on constantly updated knowledge of driver locations.

Lucent intends to offer the TCS Xypoint Location Platform and Xypoint Secure User Plane for Location (SUPL) Server with Lucent's IP Multimedia Subsystems (IMS) solutions portfolio, including the Lucent Intelligent Services Gateway (ISG), iLocator application and managed service offerings to provide network operators integrated location-based solutions. The location-based services include navigation, "family finder", asset and fleet tracking, location-specific traffic and weather information, and location-based mobile alerts and advertising.

The agreement enhances Lucent's ability to share location-based data across Lucent and TCS solutions in order to 'location enable' other applications in Lucent's portfolio such as Lucent SurePay Real-Time Rating and Charging Suite and Lucent Active PhoneBook. User location is an important attribute, together with user presence, subscriber preferences, and real-time session control that enables operators to provide blended lifestyle services.

Juniper Research, a market analyst firm, estimates that location-based services could create $4 billion in new revenue for wireless carriers by the end of 2008.