Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Friday 1 December 2006, 9:11 AM
Next generation SMS on its way
The most interesting company so far - by a long way - is NeuStar. No, I hadn't heard of it either: it handles number portability in the US. Now, it's bought Followap, Inc - no, I hadn't heard of it either, either - a UK-based company that does mobile phone IM.
There isn't any significant mobile phone IM - yet. But seventeen providers (including Vodafone - I don't have the fuil list) will be launching a joint service in the first quarter of next year, called SMS Plus. Pay 5 to 8 euros a month, and you'll get something like 500 messages, so you can converse with everyone else on SMS Plus ("The On Community" was a phrase I think I heard, although the acoustics in this room are non-optimal) in an instant messaging client.
The service will include presence - so you can see who's around, just like internet IM, but critically will not integrate with internet IM - at the moment. That may come later. It'll be sold not as IM, but as better, cheaper SMS: it will also include the ability to attach pictures and other information to a message - so you can see why the operators like the idea so much, as it gives them another chance to get MMS right.
And at the heart of it all will be NeuStar, which is managing the directory and presence services. If you want to join the community, as an operator, you talk to NeuStar. It sounds jolly monopolistic to this bear, although NeuStar makes great play of its scrupulous neutrality in dealing with carriers, commitment to open standards - it's all done with SIP and ENUM - and that "the interests of the industry are the interests of the Neustar", according to Reza Jafari, the VP International.
Interesting stuff.
PreviousComments on this post
Aha! We've known this was coming for a while, but now we know how. It'll be very interesting to see the full list of operators buying into this, and even more interesting to see whether it will have any success in stealing traffic from the web IM brands...
Hmmm.... sounds like it's still (effectively) per-message pricing. I'm pretty sure I type more than 500 messages/month into the IM client on my PC - my whole family is on it. Isn't one of the key factors about PC/Net-based IM that there's no per-message charge at all?
I think it's the mobile phone companies trying to create a half-way house between the wired Internet model where one flat rate covers everything, and their old-fashioned per-item/per-second tariff. I do believe that some of the SMS Plus consortium are thinking about true unlimited IMs for the flat rate - but not Voda.
Thing is, while the mobile phone companies are raking in billions from text messaging, you can't blame them for wanting to try and keep the cash. But they have to move over to IMS-style interoperability (if only because their systems can't keep up with the traffic otherwise), and the more classic Internet features they add the harder it'll be for them to keep on the old revenue model
I think that free software like this one:
http://www.salsamessaging.com/en/
can keep high the SMS momentum, since it allows to send longer SMS for no additional costs.
