Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
The two part deal is expected to make Sybase 365 the world's largest provider of mobile data roaming services and lead to the introduction of new inter-carrier services, but don't hold your breath for any price reductions.
In a two part deal Sybase 365 will become the exclusive service providers of C&W's GPRS exchange (GRX) which, using C&W's global MPLS network and which supports SMS messaging and mobile Internet access services when mobile users travel outside their home country. However ownership of the technology and the underlying network will remain with C&W.
In a separate deal, Sybase 365 has bought C&W's MMS hub which provides fro inter-carrier deliver of 3G multimedia messages (ie images and video). Sybase 365 already operates its own global GRX and an MMS hub servicing US domestic carriers. Marty Beard, president of Sybase 365, told iTWire that the deal would enable Sybase's international operator customers to deliver MMS messages to cellphones on US networks and its existing North American operator customers to reach over 250 operators worldwide.
The GRX deal makes Sybase the world's largest GRX provider with 73 direct operator customers. It has 17 peering agreements which extend its GRX reach to almost 500 mobile operators. The MMS deal makes it the world's largest international MMS interoperability provider with direct peering agreements with 40 customers and reach to over 250 mobile operators. Sybase 365, a subsidiary of Sybase, claims to process more than 100 billion messages per year and to reach more than 700 mobile operators and 2.4 billion subscribers around the world.
Beard explained that international inter-carrier MMS was at present fairly limited because different operators use different codecs and any MMS service must provide transcoding between these. He said that MMS roaming even between the networks of trans-national operators Hutchison and Vodafone was "not as widespread as you might expect."
Beard said that it would take time to integrate the C&W systems with Sybase 365's existing systems but he expected the integration to be completed by year end.
Down the track he said that Sybase 365 hoped to leverage the increased reach of its MMS network to offer, in conjunction with operators, new high value services across different networks, such as video sharing, that are not possible today.
When asked if the deal might have any impact on the notoriously high prices end users pay for international mobile roaming services, Beard was non-committal saying, "we haven't talked about pricing."
David Bass
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