Jibe Mobile announced the expansion of its global interconnection showcase for next week’s Mobile World Congress event being held in Barcelona, Spain. Although this announcement is focused on a demonstration, the functionality behind the demonstration is the more interesting part.
Deutsche Telekom, Sprint, Vodafone and KPN are set to team up with Jibe Mobile to illustrate the functionality of interconnecting video calling, group messaging, and photo and video sharing through a single connection point in the cloud. Many end-users today rely on over-the-top services to accomplish that type of interactivity at a lower cost than IP. Although some operators have launched similar services to the OTT players, they may not remain low-cost when traversing international connections on the traditional mobile network. Launching global IP connections through a single point of connection, however, can reduce costs while easing the interconnection requirements for the operators.
There are two products in the Jibe portfolio that provide low-cost interconnection. First is the RCS hub, a carrier-grade interconnection platform that lets operators connect once and be interconnected to other operators globally that are also connected to the RCS hub. The operators no longer have to build individual connections to multiple interconnection points around the globe.
The second product, Jibe’s IP communications cloud, is available in both private and public options giving carriers a choice in how they would like to implement their IP-based communications services and branding. Jibe is the first company to receive RCS joyn Blackbird GSMA accreditation for both the cloud-hosted and client solutions. This accreditation is part of the GSMA Network 2020 project and relates specifically to RCS. The Network 2020 project is focused on enabling the all-IP network of the future.
In addition to the four operators mentioned above participating in the demonstration at Mobile World Congress, Sony Mobile will also take part to showcase how OEMs can enable SMS/IP communications such as native messaging on the latest smartphones in conjunction with these operator services.
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Claudia Bacco, Managing Director – EMEA for RCR Wireless News, has spent her entire career in telecom, IT and security. Having experience as an operator, software and hardware vendor and as a well-known industry analyst, she has many opinions on the market. She’ll be sharing those opinions along with ongoing trend analysis for RCR Wireless News.
