Reed Thorkildsen, VP of Wireless, Syntegra

Reed Thorkildsen has spent an entire generation trying to fix the unavoidable quirks that accompany revolutionary technology. After a 20-plus-year career at Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs — where he developed speech-coding techniques for the earliest digital wireless systems — Thorkildsen is now trying to ebb the flow of wireless spam masquerading as legit SMS messages before it starts. As vice president of wireless for Syntegra, a messaging provider owned by BT Group, he's fighting on two fronts: against potential spammers and against carriers that are loath to openly discuss the problem and often overreact.

“The carriers are very reluctant to talk about actual data,” he said. “If you say you're pretty clean, it paints a big red target on you. We've heard from a couple of carriers that when they deploy an anti-spam filter in their network, there are a significant number of messages caught.”

Though the volume of wireless spam is a mere fraction of its wireline counterpart, it is starting to creep into users' everyday lives. For example, AT&T Wireless users received a recent message asking if they needed help using their phone internationally. The message, which appeared to have come from AT&T Wireless, actually was sent by a company selling an “international suite of products.”

Halting such spam now is critical, in part because carriers often charge for SMS on a per-message basis, Thorkildsen said. Multimedia messaging, progeny of SMS, also is at a critical developmental stage.

“The first killer application for wireless data is messaging,” he said. “But if we really want messaging to be the first killer application, we have to address the issues, and one of them is spam.”

Working through the various potential network-based solutions is what drives Thorkildsen. And while there is no silver bullet, the first step is convincing carriers not to shut down the ability to send messages from the Internet.

Said Thorkildsen, “When you do that, you kind of cut your nose off to spite your face.”