Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2006/02/23/will_im_replace_sms/
So, will IM replace SMS?
And who can talk to who?
Posted in Networks, 23rd February 2006 11:13 GMT
News from 3GSM that some of the biggest mobile phone networks are planning to join up to push instant messaging (IM) over mobiles needs a little thought. The PC community has long settled into islands of IM services which can almost never talk to one another.
This is not so much due to technical difficulties (which is often claimed to be the case), but is down to unwillingness of the various suppliers to adopt the same format.
As we understand it, Microsoft has always wanted to communicate with other IM systems on other networks such as Yahoo, AOL and Google, but its motives are clearly to reach onto those environments and replace the customer reliance on their home software and effectively undermine their rivals.
Which is why programming teams work night and day and issue constant release updates from those companies in a vigil to ensure that interoperability is impossible. When in actual fact for the customers it is desirable.
So why don’t Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile and China Mobile see it the same way, and why are they happy to work together to make it easy to IM between networks?
We believe this is borne of the same fear as the other wired IMs. The cellcos have a long history of having bridges to competitor networks. After all, communication is what their services are about. But what they don’t want is to sponsor an alien, possibly Microsoft owned, IM on their own handsets which might compete with SMS services.
What would be a total disaster for any of the cellcos is if SMS messages were diluted by IM, where that IM was supplied by someone else. It could take as much as 20 per cent of most operators' profits away at a stroke. And Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, Google and Skype have all announced initiatives to put their services, such as email and IM software onto handsets.
Under the initiative, there are a total of 15 operators including those listed above plus O2, Telefonica, T-Mobile and Turkcell, covering 700m mobile phone users which have agreed in principle to use a single standard for IM, across all networks from some point later in 2006. Vodafone and Orange also said that they want to be the first to get interoperability working, while Orange plans to offer a common IM service between Orange customers and Wanadoo broadband customers.
The only discernible difference between SMS and IM messaging would be the real time element of delivery, which 3G networks are more than capable of handling now with increased total bandwidth and lower latency. This would mean that interfaces could be developed which arrange messages into separate conversational threads rather than in strict order of arrival. And IM traffic can be opened up to groups, not just between two individuals.
A big difference between the various cellcos and their wired IM equivalents is the control over their service architectures and what they allow on their networks. In a way the cellcos have struck first, while they all remain walled garden type services, in the hope that by the time they find they are opening up to pure IP delivery, and as development platforms allow third party products, they won’t lose all their customers to outside software providers.
The new IM will have a system of charges like phone calls on the basis of the calling party picking up the check, although exactly how that will work with an ISP IM’ing a mobile we’re not sure. The software will be built from recommendations from the GSM Association.
What we find interesting is that Microsoft’s Telco group just got through helping Beijing Mobile, part of China Mobile, and a member of this group, put together an IM service using its Connected Services Framework, which is supposed to be gaining 10,000 customers a day, and has several million signed up for it. Even if the IM isn’t supplied using Microsoft code, it is exposed to other services using the Microsoft service framework.
From there it would be easy for it to operate as a pure web service with any other IM on the planet. It is, however, unlikely that the US cellcos are planning to join this initiative, and this week Cingular Wireless announced that Yahoo! has partnered with it to launch "AT&T Yahoo Go Mobile," which lets subscribers access Yahoo! email, IM and photo services on a Cingular mobile.
Copyright © 2006, Faultline
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