CTIA: Mobile messaging reaches new heights

LAS VEGAS – As SMS becomes many consumers' preferred means of communication, the need for updated infrastructure to support the onslaught is increasingly important. Most operators traditionally have daisy-chained together Short Message Service Centers (SMSCs) to achieve the capacity needed to deliver daily SMS messages, but today they are getting more options.

Interop Technologies announced today it has grown its SMSC up to 53,000 message delivery attempts (MDAs) per minute, building on its fall CTIA IT & Entertainment announcement of  a high of 36,000 MDA per minute. The wireless messaging and device management company is growing its SMSC 4 Series platform as Informa Telecoms & Media predicts that nearly 279 billion text messages were sent in the third quarter of 2008 in the United States and Canada, averaging more than 3 billion per day in the 90-day period. To accommodate this, Interop said the 4 Series can handle more than 4.5 billion messages per day using only a small amount of rack space.

Damian Sazama, vice president of marketing and product development for Interop, said that the platform can essentially achieve unlimited scale if SMS volumes continue to grow. It lacks legacy infrastructure and provides five-nines, or 99.999%, reliability, Interop claims. Sazama said that with the economy reducing carrier spending, more are looking to host their messaging services to cut costs. The company offers hosted, "modified-hosted" and turnkey SMSCs for its carrier partners, which include more than 50 tier-three operators. 

"We're seeing that carriers know their business model may change," Sazama said. "It's changing now that they are looking at hosting, but they want to make sure they have options in the future. With our platform, we can host them until they are ready to take that service back in-house and provide them a very easy migration path to turnkey."

TEKELEC ADOPTS FORWARD-THEN-STORE MODEL

Fellow SMS vendor Tekelec, which supplies wireless operators with core signaling competence, messaging and performance management, is taking the opposite approach to letting operators grow their SMS capacity by moving from a traditional SMSC to a modular, SMS-network focused architecture. According to Alan Pascoe, senior manager of product marketing, this shift marks a deviation from an architecture that has been the standard for the last 15 years. It was put in place in response to poor worldwide coverage and consumers who commonly turned their cell phones off for longer periods of time, unlike today, when always-on handsets mean if a message is sent, it will most likely be delivered on the first attempt.