ORANGE AND VODAFONE TO LINK MOBILE INSTANT MESSAGING COMMUNITIES
3GSM World Congress, Barcelona. Orange Group and Vodafone Group (“the companies”) today announced they are finalising an agreement to be the first multi-national mobile operators to launch Instant Messaging interoperability, with the intention to link Instant Messaging communities using the familiar “calling party pays” principle.
Working under the open standard interoperability principles, established by the GSM Association, Orange and Vodafone customers will be able to send and receive Instant Messages to friends and family seamlessly across each others’ mobile networks.
“As we have seen over the last few years, service interoperability has unlocked the true potential for mobile. While we, as mobile operators, need to compete at the retail level, we must also continue to work together at the service interoperability level in order to stimulate customer demand and to continue to grow our industry,” said Arun Sarin, Chief Executive at Vodafone. “With the support of the GSM Association, we hope to encourage all mobile operators to adopt this open, interoperable approach to instant messaging services, to ensure our customers benefit from seamless services in an environment they trust.”
The companies are actively seeking engagement from other mobile operators and ISPs to adopt the same open standard approach, in order to stimulate customer demand and drive the continued success of mobile messaging services. To date, the companies have received support and interest from China Mobile, O2 UK, Telefonica Movile Espana, T-Mobile International and Turkcell.
“Like Vodafone, we’re very supportive of the GSMA principles which aim to make mobile/ personal Instant Messaging accessible, interoperable, safe and secure. We also fully support the wider work that the GSMA is undertaking on IP interworking.
“We’re really excited about the potential of IM and building on the already proven success of text-based conversation as evidenced by the phenomenal growth of SMS over mobile and IM on PCs. Initially, we think it will be the youth market who will find mobile IM appealing but we expect it to be adopted by a much wider audience over time,” comments Sanjiv Ahuja, CEO, Orange Group.
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