The GSM Association’s annual gathering of the clan chiefs produced a clear statement of a common desire to achieve interoperability in instant messaging. How they will get there remains less clear.
China Mobile, Orange, Telefonica, TeliaSonera, TIM, T-Mobile, Turkcell and Vodafone, and the GSM operators in India — Aircel, Bharti, BSNL, Hutchison Essar, Idea, MTNL and Spice — are gearing up to rollout interoperable IM services.
The motivation for assuring IM interoperability is similar to that for all other services in GSM. The notable aspect is that although operators appear prepared to open up services to a range of IM providers, in essence they are ensuring the control and provision of the service remains within their realm.
From a business perspective, the fear for operators is that users start substituting SMS usage with free mobile IM services from the ISPs. This way, they bring IM within their control, so even if the pie is sliced in different ways, they maintain control of the pie.
IM enabler Colibria’s CTO Lars Kristian Roland believes that the news will accelerate the move towards universal interconnectivity:
“Mobile operators are currently deploying their own next generation mobile IM servers, enabling them to offer mobile IM services to their existing community. However, the success of mobile IM services is highly dependent on interconnecting each operator community, both within an individual country and internationally, and the GSMA initiative for interconnectivity outlines how to do this. At Colibria, we have conducted extensive research, in conjunction with a number of mobile operators, indicating that messaging usage will change dramatically when a user moves from SMS to instant messaging. We believe that mobile IM will increase messaging volumes considerably, as well as bringing the existing mobile community closer together through increased communication levels.”
Operators are not only interconnecting different IM communities, but also are integrating IM with existing SMS and MMS technologies. Some have taken this a step further, connecting their services to Internet-based IM services, such as MSN and GoogleTalk.
At present there are a number of ways to interconnect communities, including SIP/SIMPLE, IMPS SSP and XMPP. Different operators have adopted different approaches to their own technical implementations, but if one takes this announcement at face value, the desire is now there to standardise at least on a common user proposition, and ensure interoperability.
Between them, the 15 operator groups have signed 32 letters of intent paving the way to bilateral interoperability agreements that will allow their customers to exchange messages with users on other networks.
Of the pre-prepared statements from the operators, Antonio Viana-Baptista, Chairman and CEO, TelefĂłnica MĂłviles perhaps touched most pertinently on operator concerns.
“We in the industry should place a big bet on instant messaging. But in order to do so, we need to be bold, to overcome self-imposed limits and focus on opportunities and on how much value we give our customers. We have to learn from the past and think in an integrated way about standards, handsets, usability and distribution,” he counselled.