Jibe Mobile said it is working with Deutsche Telekom’s regional operating company Telekom Albania to offer rich IP communications services. The move builds on last month’s announcement of a deployment with SFR in France and two prior announcements last year in partnership with DT to support their regional operating companies in Romania and Slovakia.
The Android application is set to replace a device’s native messaging platform, while Apple iPhone users will receive a compatible RCS application. The website for the service is only available in Albanian, so I will summarize the translation below.
The service will enable video chat, instant messages, photo and video sharing and group messaging along with messaging options similar to “over-the-top” offers on the market today. The service should enable the mobile operator to capture a broader relationship with its customers by offering a competitive service to OTT providers while utilizing the data services the operator is already providing.
This should be a win for the customer with a more integrated solution, especially when RCS devices become part of the offer, and a win for the network operator as the services utilizing its network are actually being provided by them directly.
“Launching rich carrier-driven communications services powered by Jibe in Albania, following our successful launches in Romania and Slovakia, is another step in Deutsche Telekom’s expansion of IP communication for our customers throughout Europe,” said Kobus Smit, head of voice and messaging at Deutsche Telekom and chair of the IP communications leadership team for the GSMA. “Jibe’s centralized cloud architecture is bringing significant improvement in efficiency and much faster time to market when launching RCS in multiple geographies. Based on this success, Deutsche Telekom will interconnect with other local and international carriers via Jibe’s Cloud and RCS Hub.”
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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.
