Verizon Is Mapping a New Road to Riches

Some telcos have located a promising new revenue source in satellite navigation services.

As the cell phone morphs into an all-in-one communications and entertainment device, phone companies are constantly on the lookout for ways to make it pay off.

With the approach of Apple's (AAPL Quote) iPhone, music on cell phones is finally starting to take off -- but not in the lucrative way wireless service providers had hoped. It seems instead of spending a fortune downloading tunes over cellular networks, kids prefer loading their playlists off their computers.

And before music, cameras were going to be the big wireless revenue opportunity. But then it turned out cell phone pictures, if they were transferred at all, went to the PC, not over the air in any billable fashion.

In fact, despite a big push into multimedia and so-called third-generation, or 3G, networks, it's the lowly text messaging that still makes up most of the telcos' wireless data traffic.

The industry, and its investors, are still waiting for the golden age of mobile broadband -- complete with streaming music and live TV.

Meanwhile, other services are starting to catch on -- such as global positioning systems, or GPS. Though not quite as bedazzling as video clips, driving directions to a given destination received over a speaker on a cell phone have an appealing usefulness.