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Last modified: | What is mobile Personal IM?Personal Instant MessagingEight of the world's largest mobile network operators appeared together at a 3GSM Press conference (held in Barcelona, Spain in February 2006) to launch Personal IM – a standard for mobile instant messaging promoted by the GSM Association. All but one of the - China Mobile – have their roots back in Europe. The most fundamental difference between SMS and IM centres around the word 'instant'. IM messages are genuinely delivered immediately. There's no waiting around and certainly no equivalent of the New Year's text message which arrives 48 hours late. This gives IM real business advantages. It's one reason why financial institutions, such as Reuters, already offer their customers a fixed IM facility – because of the sheer speed and convenience. Any business which needs to despatch goods or people will be interested in IM whereas they wouldn't consider using text for mission critical applications. The second advantage to IM is that it's chatty and you can review an entire conversation. How many times have you received a text where – without the context of previous messages – you don't understand exactly what the sender means? The third advantage to IM is known technically as 'Presence' - see What is SIP?. That means you can tell immediately if a person actually has their mobile phone switched on and is ready to receive a message. The same isn't true of text messaging. There is a degree of confusion over how
mobile operators can actually implement their Personal IM services. There was a
suggestion that the operators would need to migrate their backbone networks to a
fully IP based model such as IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem). However, guidance
provided by the GSM Association (GSMA) on its web site contradicts this. The
site says, "Operators don't have to use SIP or IMS technology to provide Instant
Messaging services. Several protocols are currently available for IM - IMPS
(Instant Messaging and Presence Service), xMPP (Extensible Messaging and
Presence Protocol ) and SIP/SIMPLE (Session Initiation Protocol/ SIP for Instant
Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions) being the more obvious ones. Plus
OMA (Open Mobile Alliance ) SIP/SIMPLE is currently fully compatible with IMS."
The GSMA's advice goes onto suggest that ,"Operators are free to choose any
available protocol for IM deployment, but must be aware of the overhead cost of
technical interworking between two or more different protocols."
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