Mobile Service Providers to Offer "Joyn" Messaging

Smart phone adoption is driving mobile service provider mobile broadband revenue. But smart phones also are cannibalizing service provider voice and messaging revenue.

In 2012 the increase in smart phone penetration will cause voice and messaging revenue erosion of 3.9 percent in Western Europe and 1.6 percent erosion in Eastern Europe, according to Informa Telecoms & Media.

In fact, every increase of 10 percentage points in smart phone penetration in a given market costs Western European operators a 0.5 percent loss of voice and messaging revenue, according to Informa calculations.

For such reasons, Spain's Telefonica, the UK's Vodafone, France's Orange, Telecom Italia SpA and Germany's Deutsche Telekom AG are set to unveil a new messaging system tentatively called "Joyn" at the Mobile World Congress, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Joyn is a service made possible by the “Rich Communication Suite,”  essentially messaging applications built on IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) standards.