Manage the message

The wireless business offers multiple media for its messages. But just a few short years ago, common paging infrastructures offered the only reliable, widely available method of relaying stored messages to mobile users.

That is changing. Early on, wireless voice mail filled the gap, and it is now one of the fastest growing wireless applications.

After some early marketing stumbles, circuit-switched wireless data and cellular digital packet data have become increasingly viable methods for transporting messages and other data.

And with the current prevalence of digital networks, short message service (SMS) may finally have become a valuable service rather than just an ancillary benefit of digital deployment. In fact, SMS has proved not only useful but also easy to integrate with other forms of messaging, such as voice mail notification and wireless e-mail.

In fact, blooming discussion of wireless Internet-based applications such e-mail access may propel the success of SMS in the future.

Messaging migration The idea of wireless voice mail originally baffled both carriers and users. There was some question whether users relied on their phones enough as a primary means of staying in touch, and whether they actually received enough calls to make this form of messaging worthwhile.

The boom in wireless subscribership over the past several years eventually answered these questions in the affirmative, gradually boosting voice messaging's profile from a throw-away service to a fairly useful feature, and even a service that many users rely on to receive timely and important information.

Most industry experts say the voice-based messaging market is on the way to strong growth. Market penetration rates are hovering around 10% or so-not great, but double what they were just a couple of years ago.

"Key challenges for the industry are how to drive penetration rates and how to get people to use messaging features vs. call answering," says Patrick Verrington, vice president of applications engineering at Glenayre Technologies.

"It takes courage and knowledge to get into wireless data," says Timo Salomaki, director of wireless products at Fujitsu Software. "Carriers are still [determining] how they can use it."

Increasing wireless competition may help spur this movement. That competition is encouraging carriers to offer their users even more advanced features and functions on top of their standard voice mail services to make their messaging offerings competitive. This trend has spotlighted the server architectures that support such messaging services.

For example, vendors such as Lucent Technologies' Octel Messaging Division have expanded and revamped their traditional messaging servers with new capabilities such as notification services, multiple language support, message autoplay, fax messaging, bulletin boards and options menus.

Lucent also has improved the capacity of its Sierra voice messaging server to ensure flexible and reliable performance of messaging services. While doing this, Lucent also reduced the total physical footprint of the server to cut down on the volume of large and complex hardware being housed in carriers' networks.

"Carriers don't really have room for a lot of hardware anymore, but they still want their servers to incorporate new technologies through easy upgrades," says Jacqueline Orr, senior staff product line manager for the service provider messaging group at Lucent OMD.

The rise of SMS and e-mail PCS carriers are in a fine position to take advantage of the digital messaging era. From the start, all PCS carriers are deploying digital networks that naturally support SMS and related text messaging or broadcast messaging features. The buildout of these digital networks, and carriers' search for competitive value in their service packages, is making SMS important for today's users.

This also has created a fast-growth environment for the advanced messaging servers that support SMS. In recent years, vendors have launched SMS-specific servers and in some cases have put SMS at the center of multifunctional unified messaging or enhanced services architectures. Other vendors have rapidly added SMS functionality to existing voice messaging servers. For example, Lucent's Applications Plus Server bring interactive voice response and SMS routing technology to its Sierra-based intelligent messaging architecture/caller applications environment (Figure 1).

"As we evolve the Sierra line, it will really become more of a media server," says Orr.

Glenayre's Verrington agrees. "[We] have always had a vision of multimedia messaging, including data and e-mail," he says.

In fact, the swelling prospects for wireless Internet access and wireless e-mail may trigger a whole new generation of growth for the SMS-based world of wireless messaging.

"E-mail capability will be critical to the growth of SMS in general," says Neil Olsen, director of strategic marketing at ADC NewNet.

"People know e-mail well," says Fujitsu's Salomaki.

E-mail is so widely used that companies will come to familiarize themselves with its wireles counterpart as their workforces go mobile. Within the last year or so, many server vendors have sought to enhance their architectures again by adding e-mail support.

"The addition of e-mail was fueled by an increase in market awareness and demand," says Glenayre's Verrington, adding that e-mail's very nature is that of a two-way messaging model, rather than a store-and-forward model.

"By integrating e-mail with voice/fax messaging through unified messaging technologies and interfaces, the industry may find that this is the way to drive messaging penetration as a whole," says Verrington.

Content contentment Despite great promise, today's messaging servers likely will not develop into full Web servers anytime soon.

"Don't expect to see GIF files of dancing babies," says ADC's Olsen, adding that the servers are more suited toward information queries, such as stock quotes, news headlines and bank account balance inquiries.

"These will be services that can generate revenue, but it won't involve public access Web content," he says.

Part of the problem is that most current wireless data overlays do not support the bits-per-second speeds that make viewing Web content worthwhile. Evolving transport technologies eventually will change this, but they won't have much effect on servers in the near-term.

Instead, server vendors should focus their efforts on ensuring the capacity and functionality to support increased messaging and the growing variety of messaging methods.

In the wireline world, data traffic is now growing much faster than voice traffic. The wireless industry probably won't have to worry about the same trend anytime soon, but it does need to plan for an entirely different future-one that makes room for much more messaging and other data, and that looks vastly different than its voice-only past.