Value Added Services in India

Abstract: Value Added Services (VASs) have become one of the major revenue generators in the telecom industry. Most of the telecom subscribers have started using VAS and it has become an important service for the customers. The objective of the project is to evaluate and analyse the need for value added services in India. The report begins with a discussion of existing VAS provided by 2G wide area cellular technologies and how these will change with the introduction of 3G technology. Following this the value chain of VAS is discussed. Next new trends, drivers, and challenges of the VAS are discussed in detail. The impact of content developers and software development on VAS are discussed. Then a method to analyse VAS is discussed, followed by method of analysing the ringback tones with respect to a company is provided followed by the method to analyse the importance of the content providers in the value chain. Then the Mobile commerce VAS is analysed in detail and ringback tone service provided by OnMobile Company is analysed in detail, followed by an analysis of the role of content providers in value chain. A survey on different services provided through VAS is taken among few of the VASs users in India and the results are included with graphs in the report. The thesis analysis results are very important in the modern telecommunication industry as VAS plays a major role in generating huge revenue and currently many industries are focusing on to provide mobile commerce services to its customers. The thesis answers various questions like, what are the different M-commerce services that are provided to the customers in the telecom industry. Why OnMobile Company provides different varieties of ringback tones to the user? Why the role of content providers is very important in the Value chain? The report concludes with conclusions explaining the different insights that are gained from the analysis of the VAS (M-Commerce), Ringback tones provided by OnMobile, role of content providers in the Value chain and the survey results. It is followed by the some suggestions and possible future work concerning Value Added Services in India.