Some of the world’s largest wireless vendors are working to bypass carrier interoperability issues by supporting a standard they say will let users send advanced short message service messages back and forth between phones, regardless of the network.
“This is a way to help carriers to serve their customers better,” said Robert Elston, a spokesman for L.M. Ericsson.
Ericsson said last week it is partnering with Alcatel Alsthom, Motorola Inc. and Siemens AG in support of Enhanced Messaging Service, a Third Generation Partnership Project-approved standard. 3GPP is an accepted wireless standards body. The EMS service is an advanced form of the 3GPP-initiated SMS service, and allows users to include images, melodies and animations with their messages.
The potential for EMS messages is huge. According to the GSM Association, more than 50 billion SMS messages were sent over the world’s GSM networks in the first three months of this year. Advanced SMS messages could generate even more traffic.
The United States, however, has been noticeably absent from the SMS explosion, lagging far behind Europe and Asia in the numbers of sent messages. A major reason is U.S. carriers’ differing networks-from GSM to TDMA to CDMA. The situation prevents a VoiceStream Wireless Corp. customer from sending an SMS message to a Sprint PCS user.
The nation’s carriers have made steps toward increasing SMS usage: Just this month VoiceStream introduced its Ping Pong Wireless Internet Text messaging service, which also includes an America Online Instant Messenger function. The EMS standards move is an effort on the part of wireless vendors to increase the use of text messaging in the United States.
“It looks like this is a significant enhancement over SMS, which will help drive the market for these applications,” said Naqi Jaffery, an analyst with the Strategis Group.
However, there’s one wrench in the wheel: Nokia Corp. The mobile-phone giant-which recently passed the 35 percent market-share mark as the world’s No. 1 mobile-phone maker, according to Gartner Dataquest-was noticeably absent from the EMS sponsor lineup.
Nokia Spokesman Keith Nowak said the company sees no need to join the EMS standard effort.
“EMS is really not a whole lot different from our smart messaging platform,” he said.
Nowak said Nokia has been offering services similar to those in the EMS standard for several years now, and the company saw no reason to jump ship in midstream. In fact, Nowak said, Nokia is looking past EMS functions toward the more impressive Multimedia Messaging Service-also backed by the 3GPP-which will include video and audio treats along with text messages.
The bad news for EMS supporters is that Nokia’s current advanced SMS offerings will not be interoperable with the EMS standard, Nowak said.
“It’s not a compatible standard,” he said.
The Strategis Group’s Jaffery said interoperability is especially important for a service to succeed. If Nokia doesn’t sign on with the open EMS standard, it could create significant problems. “I think one of the things that is necessary … is uniform offerings,” Jaffery said.
EMS supporters plan to offer EMS-capable handsets by the end of the second quarter.
