Mobile working Toolkit

3GSM gets IT together

Tags:
IMS,
IM,
Wi-Fi,
VoIP

Rupert Goodwins in Barcelona ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 15 Feb 2006 13:45 GMT

...and does pretty much what you'd expect. It provides an IP-based system that can move any content between any terminals connected to the network: the trick is to make all the mobile and fixed systems part of that network. Technically, that's hard. Politically, it's harder

IMS brings with it all the bogeymen that have frightened established operators for the past ten years. It knows about open standards; it does VoIP; it breaks down all the walls between systems. It converges everything, aggressively. But it also delivers a market of a billion users today, two billion soon, six billion in the end, and it's the only idea that can.

IM itself, that simple little user-to-user application that everyone uses and nobody pays for, is going to be the first manifestation of this new world. It's been painful for the operators to make that step, because they know that they have to charge a lot less for an IM message than they do for SMS and that this will cannibalise the SMS revenues. That's OK, though: bit for bit, SMS is one of the most ludicrously overpriced data transmission services in the known universe. It couldn't continue.

But with IM comes more convergence. You're chatting to a friend, and want to send a picture you've taken. With MMS, that's an impossibly long and complicated task: with IMS, it's a single click. Similarly, push-to-talk just doesn't work unless you've got a way of managing your contacts and knowing when they're available: IM does this, and push to talk becomes just another single click. The operators have looked at what IM has already done on the desktop and seen not a freeloading leech on their voice revenues, but an engine of revenue that lets them create new services as fast as they can think them up.

It barely needs saying that convergence, like the Big Bang in reverse, leads to just one conclusion. Those Bluetooth chips with FM or Wi-Fi are using IP as their content carrier. Mobile TV phones, whatever their acronyms, use IP as their content carrier If you want to string any of these devices together, you can. The only things that can stop you are artificial barriers such as thoughtlessly deployed DRM, proprietary protocols, closed systems and the like, and those will lead their creators to less, not more, chances to make money.

Fourteen of the world's top mobile phone operators and every last handset maker has said that convergence on open standards is the future: those who wish to stand aside are demonstrating bravery that could be mistaken for foolishness. Everything that rises must converge: everything else is just left behind.