Standardised service capabilities: the need for standardisation illustrated by the development of the presence service

It has been frequently stated that services will no longer be standardised but it is the service capabilities available as tool kits for developers that will be standardised. Such tool kits provide the foundation upon which numerous services can be deployed to serve the end user. Despite this, industry bodies such as the 3rd Generation Project Partnership (3GPP) still standardise complete services such as the multimedia messaging service. The rationale for this latter approach should be questioned and the reasons why the toolkit approach has not been more widely adopted analysed. In a 3G wireless environment, the provision of services could be provided by different players and is not reserved to the traditional telecommunications service providers. It is therefore essential to reach an agreement between the operators that run the networks, the manufacturers that provide telecommunications equipment and application developers to ensure interoperability. Clearly it is desirable to reuse as much work that as been done in bodies such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). This paper provides a case study on the presence service, a capability that is currently being standardised in 3GPP, to identify a successful approach to toolkit standardisation and the development of a broad range of support across different players in the industry.