MTS, Megafon, Vimpelcom and T2 RTK X formed an alliance to compete with instant messengers

Telecom operators from Big Thursday - MTS, Megafon, VimpelCom (under the Beeline brand) and T2 RTK Holding (under the Tele2 brand) united in an alliance to standardize IP interfaces of Internet services, among which similarly present messengers. The main task of the alliance is the development of standards that will make messengers compatible with each other.

Now subscribers do not have the possibility of cross-platform sending messages between all instant messengers. How exactly the standardization will take place is not specified yet. Among the problems, MTS Vice-President for Marketing, Vasily Latsanich, notes the absence of rules for licensing the provision of services to operators, while the developers of instant messengers and web services do not need licensing. Because of this, telecom operators are suffering, whose revenues from voice communications are reduced due to competition with free instant messengers.
')

“We decided that we should not fight this process, but head it. We are not in favor of licensing for Internet players, but we want the state to have opportunities to control these services, so that everyone will be in more or less the same environment, ”he specifies to the Kommersant publication.

The operators alliance was created at the end of 2015 as part of the work of the Network 2020 group at the association of mobile operators GSMA, and any company can join the alliance.

In 2016, representatives of the alliance met with the Ministry of Communications and expressed their willingness to implement support for all-IP services - Voice-over-LTE (VoLTE, voice over LTE networks), Voice-over-Wi-Fi (VoWi-Fi, voice over Wi networks -Fi), Video-over-LTE (ViLTE, video transmission over LTE networks) and Rich Communications Services (RCS, a service that allows you to exchange messages, images and make video calls).

Among the key shortcomings of this initiative is the lack of clear criteria for regulating instant messengers at the government level. Most operators are still focusing on voice services, while users are increasingly preferring to consume Internet traffic, which also includes voice communication through popular instant messengers.

How exactly the operator will be able to make their offer more profitable than free calls, regardless of the location of the subscriber - is not entirely clear. But the operators themselves will primarily benefit from this type of regulation.