Will it take a 'Wireless Village' to make instant messaging succeed?

Industry-wide promotion of wireless instant messaging standard hopes to avoid wired world's problems.

By Catherine Applefeld Olson

Wireless Village—the universal mobile instant messaging initiative spearheaded by Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia—already has garnered support from more than 300 companies, according to the founders.

The trio of mobile mavens late last month announced they would unite to develop and promote an open architectural specification, protocol specifications, and test specifications and tools for Mobile and Instant Messaging and Presence (IMPS) services via wireless devices.

The instant messaging spec, which is envisaged to encompass mobile phones and other devices such as personal digital assistants and pagers, will be based on prevalent bearer protocols and standards such as SMS, MMS, WAP, SPI and XML. The service is planned to include a variety of security capabilities and will be applicable to existing 2G, GPRS and emerging 3G network technologies.

Fall Meeting Scheduled
"There has been incredible interest in this initiative during the past few weeks," Lars Novak, development manager for multimedia and messaging applications at Ericsson Mobile Communications, tells Wireless Networks Online. "Already up to 300 companies have downloaded our supporter agreement from the Internet."

Interested parties, which Novak says include "all major IM service providers" will be invited to gather at a meeting tentatively slated for late September/early October in Orlando, Fla., where Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia hope to demonstrate the first interoperable application. Novak says the Wireless Village team plans to publish the specifications on Dec. 7, 2001, and begin shipping products that incorporate the technology early next year.

Although the three founders stopped short of committing to specific products that will incorporate the new IM protocol, they promise that consumers won't have to look too hard to find Wireless Village-ready devices.

"You can imagine the distribution volumes each of the [participating] manufacturers has—they are huge," Novak says. "We will very rapidly reach the equivalent population that is already using instant messaging in the fixed applications market."

Companies Hope to Build on Past Successes
No strangers to the art of joining hands to advance the wireless market, Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia have partnered before to jump-start a number of open-standards initiatives, including the WAP Forum and groups to further open standards for GSM and Bluetooth.

This time around they hope their collective muscle will quash the non-interoperable IM services scenario in the mobile market that already is beginning to mirror the nightmare of the wireline Internet world. In the latter arena, companies such as America Online and Microsoft have been publicly butting heads over operability issues regarding their proprietary instant messaging services.

"Today on the Internet there are a number of proprietary solutions but no open solution, and we wanted to have one instant messaging protocol that is interoperable between different devices," Novak says. "It is in everyone's best interest. Because the [founding] companies are so big we have the mass to be able to form a new group to promote open standards. We start it, and then when we are on track we open it up to everyone."

AOL and MSN Invited to Participate
Novak says he anticipates America Online, credited with rocketing the instant message phenomenon into the consumer Internet experience, and other existing IM will work closely with the Wireless Village. "We are not trying to compete with them," Novak says. "What we hope from MSN and AOL and the other instant messaging service companies is that they will add Wireless Village to their existing systems as a plug-in so that their users will be able to connect to a Wireless Village Server.

"They still can continue to have existing customers, but by supporting Wireless Village their customers can connect to other wireless customers who are using Wireless Village, and the good thing is [our technology] is manufacture-independent. It doesn't depend on a given phone or device."

Cathy is a tech writer based in Northern Virginia. You can reach her at catholson@aol.com.