South Korean Mobile Ops Launch “joyn”

SK Telecom, KT and LG Uplus in South Korea are launching “joyn” services to combat inroads being made by over the top messaging services. At first, each carrier will operate joyn as a service available only to users of its own network, but interoperability between the three carriers is expected in 2013.

Joyn, the brand created to support  Rich Communication Services (RCS), allows customers to make Internet-based voice calls and video calls and send chat messages as well. Joyn supports individual and group messages of up to 5,000 characters,, Yonhap news service reports.

In South Korea, KakaoTalk is among the rival services mobile service providers must contend with.

The service is initially available on 22 different types of Android phones, and can be downloaded from each operator’s app store for free. SKT says it will announce extended Android support and an iOS version early in 2013.

Messages to non-users will be sent as text messages, as is the case with Apple’s iMessage service, while a PC-based version is slated to launch in Korea in the first quarter of the new year.

SKT says the service will be free for users of its flat-rate 3G and LTE tariffs. For all other customers, chat and text messages will be charged at 20 won ($0.02) and video calling upwards of 0.6 won per second (that’s circa $0.03  per minute).

Some think joyn will face major obstacles. KakaoTalk has more than 70 million users worldwide and, in its native Korea, is installed on more than 90 percent of the country’s smart phones.

Smartphone messaging apps are hugely popular across Asia. Alongside KakaoTalk, China’s WeChat (near-300 million users) and Japan’s Line (85 million) have grown massively in 2012. Of course, the issue is less the installed base of apps but the volume of WhatsApp messages being sent and received by mobile users.

But not all mobile service providers seem to think joyn is the more profitable way to compete in the messaging market. The logic is simply that the OTT apps already have achieved such large installed base and scale that any new entrant will have trouble dislodging users.

Indonesian carrier Telkomsel in fact has partnered with Kakao Talk, rather than participaing in the joyn effort. But it would be fair to argue that most service providers will try joyn.

In Spain, Movistar, Orange and Vodafone, Spain's three leading mobile service providers, have launched "Rich Communication Services" using the joyn brand.

Spain has been the first country in the world to offer a fully interoperable carrier-owned over the top voice and messaging app, meaning that any customers of any of the mobile service providers can communicate with each other.

In Germany, Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone both support joyn, and the leading South Korean mobile operators appear to be following that approach as well.

The idea is that joyn will allow mobile service provides to create a very large community of users, with access to "rich" voice and messaging ("rich" generally implies support for video) features. That scale effect might ultimately be crucial for joyn success, as well as the ability of mobile service providers to blunt the over the top messaging app attack.

There are about three or four different ways mobile service providers globally can react to over the top messaging.

About half the options are hostile or unfriendly to the consumer. Carriers can block use of over the top apps, or charge extra fees for people who use the generally free apps. Neither of those approaches are especially desirable in competitive markets where another provider will avoid blocking or charging.

There are two approaches that are less surly ways of approaching the problem. Joyn is one way of competing with a carrier-owned alternative intended from the start to be a "third party" brand.

In other cases, carriers have created their own branded OTT apps. The level of competition in a given market tends to suggest whether mobile service providers should offer their own OTT apps, or avoid doing so.

In markets where voice and messaging revenue already is sharply declining, competing might be the only choice. In other markets, where there is less pressure, service providers generally will resist jumping into branded OTT voice and messaging apps, to avoid cannibalizing carrier voice and messaging.

In other cases, as with Verizon Wireless, carriers simply offer unlimited domestic calling and texting as a basic network access fee, to undercut the value proposition of the "free" OTT apps.   That arguably works best where there is a very-large internal calling market.