Some time after they said they would, mobile operators are starting to sneak out RCS-e services under the joyn brand. Following Telefonica and Vodafone in Spain, Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom have both started to offer joyn apps in Germany.
Initial reaction from users was quite polarised. A look at the Google Play reviews showed that the majority of users either seemed to hate it "A poor WhatsApp" and gave it one star, or loved it and awarded it the full five.
But who cares about the users? The commercial availability of something carrying the joyn brand was good news for those tasked with getting operators to see the light and introduce interoperable, rich communications tech.
Graham Trickey, senior director of the RCS project at the GSMA said, “This week we have seen milestone announcements from both Vodafone and Deutchse Telekom as they both reinforce the operators’ commitment to joyn and RCS services. It’s also great news for the thousands of users in Germany who can now use the many capabilities joyn allows, straight out of the box. German operators are leading the charge in building the interoperable service which we believe lays the ground for the future of messaging services worldwide. By the end of the year we will see handsets hit the shelves with joyn embedded in the device. ”
Joyn is the brand given by the GSMA and operators to services built on the RCSe specification – designed to enrich messaging with enhanced functionalities such as file sharing, video calling, group and instant messaging.
Aside from its consumer uses, many see its joyn's chief benefit to operators as an enabler of other services, by letting developers use APIs to treat the functionality as an "add comms" functionality to their apps.
Indeed, it's worth remembering that one of Vodafone's RCS-e experts isn't that bothered about joyn as a consumer-facing brand – and certainly not in the long term. Nor is it about functionality – it's about the experience. Back in June we wrote:
Vodafone is not interested in having a specific RCS-e messaging brand on its phone, whether Joyn or anything else. Instead, it wants to see RCS-e employed to provide capability discovery in the network and the device. A user will have his messaging app, and that will be supported by the ability to discover network conditions, device capabilities, and presence as a capability. …And another thing – Stroppa was pretty blunt about so-called innovation in RCS-e. In terms of the feature set, he said, there is none. ICQ did all the feature set innovation a decade ago. "ICQ really invented chat, it invented presence, IM, group chat, file sharing. Let's get everything in perspective, innovation is in the experience space, not in the feature set," he said.
Joyn, Stroppa said, is mainly about the ability to provide a better service for voice; about the ability to add video to calling, providing a very good user experience by removing barriers to action. 3G video calling was a "nightmare" because you had to know if the other person had a video phone, was on 3G, wanted to do a call – quite aside from network QoS. RCS-e takes care of that, which is what is meant by capability discovery. "In fact we joked that the e in RCS-e stands for edge, because really what we are doing is providing edge to edge service discovery."
So although it's easy to have a pop at the operators for missing the launch deadlines they so publicly set for themselves 18 months ago, don't let the delay in commercial service blind you to the potential for RCS-e as a platform to add comms functionality to apps, generating a much better user experience. With the likes of Twilio out there doing this on an OTT basis, it's important that mobile operators find a way to extract the undoubted value they have, and enrich services that do not just exist under their own service portfolio. If the stripped down re-set of the meter of RCS-e can help bring this about, then a few missed deadlines and "But we already have WhatsApp objections will matter little.
Across the border from Germany, the French operators were getting a reminder of how much of an impact Free Mobile is having on the market. Yes, the Iliad Group's mobile odyssey has got off to a good start, hoovering up 3.6 million customers in the fisrt six months of oeprator, and generating €320 million in revenues. Free seems to be taking chunks out of its competitors in equal measure, producing a chart that claimed everyone elses' market share had gone down a point, while it rose 5 points.
The impact Free has had is undoubted. Vivendi is all over the place with its management of SFR, Bouygues is also feeling the pinch and scaring the unions, and there were noises this week from Orange's CEO Stephane Richard that the French operators would be having a closer look at network sharing to try and eliminate a bit of cost from their businesses. With Free committed to a billion Euro network rollout and aggressive pricing, and French operators committed to LTE rollouts in newly available spectrum, you can see the imperative.
Finally, the GSMA was there to remind us that even though the Paralympics may still be on, many people are still on holiday, and IT'S STILL AUGUST, it's not too soon to remind everyone that there are only a few short months left to Mobile World Congress. The theme of next year's event will be "The New Mobile Horizon". The thing about horizons, I think, is that you can never reach them. I'm sure there's some cutting analogy to be made there, but it's late, and I've got a chocolate phone to eat.
Keith Dyer
Mobile Europe
FACT OF THE DAY (courtesy of Acision, who have decided to celebrate 20 years of SMS a little early):
"The first text message was sent on 3 Dec 1993 and read "Merry Christmas".
FREE WHITE PAPER OF THE DAY (courtesy of Blinq Networks):
Small Cell Wireless Backhaul Business Case