GSMA miffed that Apple won’t join joyn

Heard of joyn? No? I’m not surprised. It’s not exactly a household name, although the global cellular network operator community would like it to be.

They’d like to see joyn being as familiar to the gazillions of smartphone owners as, say, Apple or Android because joyn is their vision of how they will claw back share of value from over-the-top providers of services to smartphones and thus prevent themselves being relegated to the role of mere connectivity providers.

There’s nothing new about joyn, it’s just a new name for a concept that’s been part of the cellular landscape for several years, but with the rather less consumer-friendly name of Rich Communications Suite (RCS). So what’s it all about?

RCS, according to Wikipedia, is “a global initiative to deploy inter mobile] operator services within an industry ecosystem.” It was created by the global GSM Association essentially as a set of standards and a standard architecture to enable a range of value added services to be delivered over mobile networks. joyn was coined as the brand name under which such services would be promoted to the public. joyn services will be able to be offered across multiple networks. Trouble is, it hasn’t caught on, yet.

If you go to the joyn web site (www.joynus.com) you might wonder why you’re not already familiar with joyn. “The world’s top mobile phone operators and manufacturers support joyn” it says. “joyn brings simplicity to real-time chat, video share and file share. No passwords, no registering, no new address book - it just works.”

The reality is that the industry’s hopes for joyn remain unfulfilled. Total Telecom reported in August “Only seven percent of 40 global mobile operators surveyed by Tyntec and Mobile Squared answered 'yes' to the question: ‘Do you believe Joyn will be the solution that mobile operators are waiting for to tackle the threat posed by OTT players? A further 29 percent said 'yes, but it has taken too long to launch', while another 29 percent said 'no', noting that it is too late for Joyn to make an impact.”

Philippe Bellordre, project manager of future interconnection at the GSMA told a conference organised by Total Telecom last week that 16 operators in total had launched RCS, and a further 67 had publicly committed to it. Spain is most advanced. There Vodafone, Telefónica, and Orange have launched interoperator joyn services. SK Telecom launched john services in February and claims to have signed up one million customers in the first 60 days.

Bellordre told Total Telecom that GSMA still sees joyn/RCS as the industry’s best hope for countering OTT players and is now banking on IPX (IP exchange) to give it a helping hand. What’s IPX? (Not to be confused with Internetwork Packet Exchange, a networking protocol from Novell that interconnects networks that use Novell's NetWare clients and servers) It’s the new way in which mobile operators will exchange voice and data traffic with each other, particularly to support international roaming.

When fully implemented it should enable you to access all the services you get on your home network when you are overseas and it would also enable your home operator to develop and deliver services specific to travellers, such as local news highlights, video etc (clearly international roaming charges would have to drop dramatically). In addition to providing connectivity it allows for charges to be passed back from delivering service provider to originating content provider and for every party along the way to ‘clip the ticket’.

IPX is still in its infancy (Telstra Global launched its IPX service only a year ago) so perhaps there is hope for joyn yet. However one operator quoted by Total Telecom identified Apple as a stumbling block, says that was needed to make joyn a household word was “a cool handset”, and Apple has refused to join the GSMA board.

However Apple hardly has a monopoly on cool handsets. It is facing a very strong challenge from the Android community, particularly from Samsung. Trouble is through, handset manufacturers are also moving into services, and of course Android is backed by the Google - the biggest OTT provider of all, So it's hard to see many players other than the operators themselves being totally committed to the success of john.