Ericsson, Nokia and Motorola converge on wireless standards

Three of the world’s top four wireless handset manufacturers--Nokia, Motorola and Ericsson--have created the Wireless Village Initiative, which hopes to establish universal specifications for mobile instant messaging and presence services (IMPS) by the end of the year.

The specifications will be used for exchanging messages and presence information between mobile devices, mobile services and Internet-based instant messaging services. Plans call for the Wireless Village Initiative to deliver an architectural specification, protocol specifications and defined procedures and tools for testing conformance and interoperability of mobile IMPS. All of this will be based on an open platform.

According to Paul Chellgren, vice president of business development for Nokia, universal standards are needed now more than ever before, because the messaging and presence space is growing and changing rapidly.

In a press conference held today, he indicated worldwide short messaging service (SMS) traffic exceeded 15 billion messages in December 2000 alone, and that AOL is reporting 130 million registered users and Microsoft MSN and Yahoo! both reporting 15 million registered users.

“There are major changes ongoing in the mobile landscape,” he said. “The Internet and wireless domains are steadily converging. Both mobile consumers and professionals are demanding new services to bring the wireless world to their lives. Operators are under huge pressures to leverage the investments they have made in the current 2G, 2.5G and emerging 3G networks … and are also looking to new services to further deliver their brands to the consumer marketplace.”

Chellgren said consumers will benefit from a solution that offers interoperable instant messaging in presence from any device--mobile phone or desktop PC--on any network from any location. He said service providers also will benefit, because they will need to deploy a only single-service solution to address multiple customer needs while interoperating seamlessly across multiple devices from different manufacturers.

Chellgren predicted wireless network operators will find the Wireless Village initiative an attractive opportunity to increase average revenue per user and other revenue-generating service such as the distribution of shared content.

Once the standards are in place, perhaps the biggest winners will be wireless handset manufacturers, which will be able to use one protocol that will support a common set of widely adapted features. Plus, they’ll get to sell more handsets. Nokia’s Frank Dawson, Wireless Village chairman, acknowledged this but stressed that this is not the motivation behind the initiative.

“The attempt of the group is to leverage the millions of users that are out there today who are doing simple text messaging such as SMS,” he explained. “However, …you won’t get the same robust user experience from using the existing phones. Users are going to get a better experience with the clients that are specifically targeted for the universal mobile IMPS standard. So, I think there will be a drag of new handset sales, as well as new services within the operator and the wireline environment.”