LATAM Telecom

The initiative by Brazilian Operators together with GSMA is groundbreaking in Latin America, not only because of the imminent launch of Personal Instant Messaging in the region with all six operators offering interconnection but also for the fact that these operators are sitting together in a work group to define a product, evaluate vendors and complete a through study before launch. We expect that this will delay even more the launch of the service, which has been evaluated by operators like TIM, VIVO and Claro for at least two years now. However, the approach of this work group, led by Ms Paloma Vivanco of GSMA, will increase the likelihood of a succesful launch and service penetration. The work group met recently in Rio to discuss with different vendors their solutions. Among the vendors presenting were market leaders Acision, Colibira and Comverse, as well as an up and coming Uruguayan company, INI. The only other big IM vendor that always seems to be absent from Latin America init...

A little more than a year ago, Telefonica Moviles Spain and Colibria announced the launch of SMS 2.0 (source Colibira Press release , Nov 2006). Earlier this year, both parties announced interconnectivity with Vodafone’s Messenger (source Colibria Press release , Feb 2007). Telefonica has been working hard this year to bring the same service to Latin America. This should be an interesting move, given the difficulties IM/Presence vendors like Colibria and Oz have had introducing a Portal IM gateway service in Latin America. SMS 2.0 is much more than an upgrade to an SMS platform/service, it is actually a repackaging of what we know as Operator IM. The new 'feature' of this service allows seamless communication with subscribers that do not have the service (SMS 2.0 is a presence application), and they can exchange SMS messages that will be received by the other subscribers through the SMS 2.0 application. While SMS 2.0 can be expected initially to have a limited scope (it require...