A New Generation

If someone told Ray Tomlinson, the inventor of e-mail, that the messaging platform would endure for 30 years and pervade modern communications, he might have told that person to take a flying leap. Wireless messaging could be the next e-mail, if carriers could create true interoperability and leverage the potential of new messaging protocols such as instant messaging (IM) and multimedia messaging services (MMS).

It was 1971 when Tomlinson created a way for ARPAnet users to send electronic messages to one another. Wireless messaging today does basically the same thing through the air. It transmits text. But MMS and IM can add graphics and presence information. Voice recognition and location-based extensions also are being added to messaging platforms.

Although SMS success is apparent in Europe, the same is not true here — yet.

According to the GSM Association, 250 billion text messages will be sent this year. Though SMS has been less popular in the United States due to diverse network technology and a lack of calling party pays, one recent study revealed a doubling of domestic SMS traffic since January. The same A.T. Kearney survey showed that 12% of U.S. subscribers regularly send messages wirelessly.

Opening the Walled Garden

Industry executives agree that U.S. SMS traffic will take off once the technology is more tightly integrated with other forms of messaging, such as IM.

“We're seeing tremendous growth … in SMS traffic,” said Steve Krom, Cingular vice president of marketing, data and Internet services. “You will see explosive growth once you create a tighter coupling between SMS and a lot of the instant messaging offerings out there from companies like MSN and Yahoo.”

Although wireless data subscribers can access IM services, current processes are complex. By streamlining this process, wireless users would have access to IM's main benefit — real-time tracking of the presence and availability of contacts.

“True interactivity (is when) someone's on their desktop using instant messaging and they see Steve Krom's online on the mobile,” he said. “That will be the type of integration that will need to happen to reach the next level of growth.”

Most industry executives agree that true wireless IM growth will not occur until AOL opens its IM system. The success or failure of alternative IM platforms will depend on AOL's cooperation.

“Quite a few of those people are claiming to be interoperable with the big three: AOL, Yahoo and MSN,” said Eileen Donahue, Nextel senior manager of messaging services. “They are interoperable in the sense that you can send and receive messages on those networks, but technically they don't have business relationships in place that permit them to do that. So at any time, any one of those big three can pretty much shut somebody down. What (AOL) says and what they do is a little different.”

Eventually, Donahue said, market pressure will force open their systems.

Although it may take years, organizations such as Wireless Village — with members Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia — are pushing for mobile IM standards.

“Chief among the technologies consumers are asking for is mobile IM and presence services. Research Portal.com reports IM is the No. 2 requested application after voice,” Wireless Village stated in a report.

Wireless Village hopes future solutions will include user status, location, device capabilities, moods and hobbies.

Craig Peddie, Motorola general manager, Lexicus division, and founding member of Wireless Village, said the biggest challenge for IM platform interoperability is server interconnectivity.

“We need to have a single client that works with multiple IM services like AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft,” Peddie said. “Our fundamental goal is to be able to have one client software program that resides in the handset but is capable of taking on the look and feel of any of these different IM services and interoperating with them.”

The Wireless Village client-server protocol and server-server protocol currently are in development.

“It would be over-the-air customizable, and it would be aware of which IM service it was talking to,” he explained. “We've already done our first interoperability tests between Ericsson, Nokia and Motorola.”

Wireless Village members and supporters were to have received version 1.0 of the protocol by the end of October, with the full release scheduled for February 2002.

“The fundamental thing the big operators over here will have to overcome is the walled-garden approach — where now I can't send a message from Verizon to AT&T,” Peddie said. “Until they are willing to drop those barriers, that will slow down the adoption of 2-way messaging here.”

A Thousand Words

Messaging has been successful as a wireless data application because it's so basic. Like voice, it allows for dialog. Future MMS apps will build on dialogue-based communications by adding visuals.

Donahue said Nextel is exploring MMS options. Although some Asian carriers have started testing video-messaging applications, domestic carriers, for the most part, must wait for 2.5G or 3G networks to bring the increased bandwidth required for MMS and streaming applications.

But the solutions are out there. Logica, in its “Essential Guide to Multimedia Messaging,” said MMS will allow users to write more than 160 characters (the current SMS limit) and add creative typefaces, drawings, animated images, full-color photos, music, voice clips or short video clips. Nokia also offers an MMS solution.

The technology may not appear in the United States until 2002, but there are plans to deploy MMS solutions in Japan by year-end.

Most MMS messages will be handled similarly to SMS. When users send an MMS message, it will not go directly to the recipient but will go into the carrier's message center, or MMSC, just as SMS messages today travel through the SMSC.

3GPP has defined the four key functional elements of an MMSC:

• MMS relay — transcodes and delivers messages to mobile subscribers

• MMS server — stores the message

• MMS user agent — a server that allows users to view, create, send, edit, delete and manage multimedia messages

• MMS user databases — contains records of user profiles and subscription data.

MMS services still are in development at companies such as Logica, Motorola and Nokia. The services will be available for commercial deployment later this year and into next.

Multimedia messaging and IM services may converge on Motorola's future messaging platform, according to Peddie.

Successful MMS solutions require advanced devices with similar capabilities on both the sending and receiving side. New handsets, PDAs and converged devices will “know” the capabilities of other devices they communicate with.

“Presence, we believe, is a fundamental piece of instant messaging, and messaging in general,” Peddie said. “There's the fundamental idea of whether somebody's on or off … But … presence is going to take on a whole different aspect … If I send you a message from a device with an integrated camera on it, but you're walking around with a small phone with a monochrome display, then I wouldn't bother sending you that picture.”

New apps may combine IM and MMS.

“A carrier could choose to deploy strictly an instant-messaging solution with presence, or if they were to go the multimedia route, instant messaging then becomes essentially a value-added service on top of that general multimedia platform,” he said.

In December trials, Motorola plans to test picture messaging and IM apps.

Nextel's Donahue agreed that applications of the future will integrate IM, MMS and video messages. But until 2.5G and 3G networks are fully operational, she said, e-mail and basic 2-way messaging will be very important to many wireless subscribers.

“Our direction in the future is really what we can do in the IM area,” Donahue said. “And after that, we will be looking at MMS and some of the capabilities there.”

Krom said new messaging applications will require tomorrow's networks and devices.

“As GPRS and other services come out, they will enable us to provide simultaneous voice and e-mail,” he said. “A handset today will not be an effective tool for that. PDAs and other devices will be critical … to work well with (advanced) wireless networks as well as services — be they SMS, e-mail or instant messaging. The next phase needs to integrate the device with the client, the network and the messaging services.”

Middleman

While vendors create advanced messaging solutions and carriers build next-generation networks, companies such as Wireless Services Corporation (WSC) are making sure these two parts can work together, whether a message is sent within a carrier network or between networks based on different air-interface technologies.

WSC provides servers to accomplish this goal at three levels. First, the server creates interoperability between diverse messaging apps within a homogeneous network. One of WSC's customers is Nextel, which uses the company's server to make sure SMS and packet-data messages can communicate via handsets or PCs.

The second level of functionality is when a WSC server — called a wireless application delivery platform (WADP) — sends messages within a carrier network between subscribers using different network protocols, such as TDMA to GSM.

These first two levels are common today, and WSC's customers include Nextel, Nextel International and SkyTel. VoiceStream has been a WSC customer but is not currently.

The third level, however, is the one carriers are not yet willing to ascend to, according to Steve Wood, WSC president & CEO. Cost, fear of churn and other concerns have kept U.S. carriers from provisioning their networks for true global messaging interoperability. Intercarrier gateways and interoperability between messages of all varieties — be they SMS-, IM- or MMS-based — is possible today.

“We can do that, and it's fairly straightforward for us,” he said. “U.S. carriers have not seen this as a priority to date, and they have not chosen to provide that interoperability. One, they are concerned about maintaining a walled garden for their user experience. They want to control the user experience, keep it inside their network. There traditionally has been somewhat of an, in my opinion, unjustified fear that if you provide connectivity outside the network, it makes it easier for somebody to leave your network and jump to somebody else. I think to a large degree that is unjustified. And the numbers in Europe and Asia will bear that out.”

Wood argues that the pay-off in increased data traffic, and therefore profit from messaging services, would far exceed the risk of churn.

“(Interoperability) increases your network usage by 300% to 400%,” he said. “Therefore, the amount of additional revenue you get from people using your data network can be significant.”

Warren Wilson, Summit Strategies analyst, agrees with Wood's assessment but thinks carriers are beginning to see the light.

“Carriers are coming to understand the potential of SMS as a revenue generator, if they open up their networks and make SMS interoperable across networks,” Wilson said. “Their attitudes are changing.”

MMS Milestones

Date	Milestone
Early 2000	First MMS terminals announced (Ericsson T68)
2000 to 2001	Continuing GPRS, 3G and MMS standardization with network architectures, terminal requirements and detailed standards
2000 to 2001	3G licenses for Phase I spectrum awarded by governments in Europe and Asia
Mid-2001	Release 4 of 3GPP MMS specs frozen; WAP-MMS specs (based on pre-release 4 specs from 3GPP) frozen in WAP 2.0 suite
2001 to 2002	GPRS networks rolled out commercially around the world
Late 1Q02	First MMS terminal (Ericsson T68) commercially available
March 2002	Release 5 of 3GPP MMS specs frozen
Mid-2002	M-Services Stage 2 devices, of which MMS is a compulsory part, start shipping.
2002	MMS infrastructure trials and contracts are placed in Europe, North American and Asia.
Late 2002	Commercial volumes of MMS terminals begin shipping.
2003 to 2004	MMS reaches critical mass in terms of installed base of MMS-capable terminals.