A word from the Wireless Village

A word from the Wireless Village - Established in early 2001 to enable interoperability in the Mobile Instant Messaging area, the Wireless Village forum has released it's specifications this week, according to this story from German news site heise.de. The Wireless Village initiative is interesting because of it's huge backing from the mobile crowd. Founded by Motorola, Ericsson and Nokia, the initiative is now backed by a large number of industry heavy-weights, and is supported by The IEEE Industry Standards and Technology Organization (IEEE-ISTO).
The idea behind the standard is to find a standardized way of dealing with wireless specific issues, such as high network latency, in instant messaging. The challenge of interoperability is, as with most other wireless standards, the potential party-killer of the standard. If the initiative is able to commit operators to a standardized format, and can handle the problems that always occur with billing between operators, the standard could be really interesting. With cynicism born of experience in the mobile space, it will most likely start life as a system that can be used amongst users of specific operators. And that just isn't good enough.
After all, if you can only get at some of your contacts through mobile instant messaging, while you can SMS anyone in your address book, regardless of operator, the addition of presence information, i.e. whether or not your contact is available, is probably not the killer function.

The first products that live up to the new spec should arrive on the market around Q4-2002. So let's wait and see what kind of support this will get from operators.

Analysis of 3G problems - I highly recommend yesterdays (Thursday, Feb 14) posting on the 802.11b weblog. It's an insightful, brief analysis of the problems we can expect with bandwidth on future 3G networks, and the reasons why we should cloesely follow 802.11b and g developments. Read it!