Interoperability: More important than ever

Although wireless carriers may not want to admit it, we all know why messaging is bigger than Britney Spears in Europe and Asia but hasn’t caught on in North America: interoperability.

Because European carriers share network technology, interoperability hasn’t been a barrier for them. But in North America, where there’s a wireless technology for every taste, interoperability has all but rendered wireless instant messaging DOA.

This week, our Canadian neighbors announced a partnership that will break the interoperability barrier for messaging in that country. Canada’s four largest wireless carriers, Bell Mobility (www.bell.ca), Microcell Connexions (www.microcellcnx.com), Rogers AT&T Wireless (www.rogers.com) and TELUS Mobility (www.telusmobility.com), have joined to develop an initiative that will enable inter-carrier, text messaging for digital wireless customers across the country.

The four operators will enable both origination and termination of short message service (SMS) between their respective wireless networks. This enhanced functionality will be available to all of their text messaging subscribers coast-to-coast. Canadian wireless users will be able to easily send and receive text messages to and from users of different networks by simply addressing it to the recipient’s phone number.

“The explosive growth of SMS seen in Europe has been limited in North America largely due to technology barriers,” said Mark Quigley, Yankee Group Canada (www.yankeegroupcanada.com) research director. “In the past, mobile-to-mobile SMS messages in North America were restricted by incompatible technologies in use by the independent cellular operators. This agreement removes those barriers by bridging the incompatible networks, representing North America’s first intercarrier, multinetwork mobile text messaging initiative.”

He said the move will lead to an overall increase in Canadian SMS traffic and open the door to the development of new text-based mobile notification and communication services for the Canadian wireless market.

In just two years, the number of SMS messages sent worldwide has grown from 1 billion messages a month to more than 16 billion messages a month, and this number is expected to continue to grow. Intercarrier SMS messaging has become a phenomenon in Europe and Asia, and now Canadians will have this same functionality, regardless of which network they subscribe to.

The Canadian carriers selected CMG Wireless Data Solutions (www.cmg.com) to provide the technology for the service. CMG will provide its Inter-SMSC Router (ISR) service to manage the SMS cross-carrier traffic. The service will bridge all the leading mobile network technologies, including CDMA, GSM, iDEN and TDMA, and encourage easy interconnection of carriers and scalable worldwide connection in the future. The goal is to create seamless mobile text messaging and match successful European trends.

According to Erik Debueger, CMG vice president, North America, carriers still use their own technology to deliver SMS, and CMG’s turnkey technology sits on top to provide connectivity.

U.S. carriers have bigger challenges than European carriers because of their AMPs history, he said. In the United States, the first challenge is to create a unified data backend and one network.

“(U.S. carriers) must take away the technology hurdle so that users only need to know a phone number to send a message (not e-mail address, network, technology),” he added. “If we can get to that simplicity in the United States, we’ll be set for success.”

And that success can’t come soon enough. According to a new report from U.K. research firm Baskerville (www.baskerville.telecoms.com/z/mm) today’s person-to-person messaging market will be the main driver of increased wireless data adoption and crucial to the future of 3G services. Senior analyst Georgina Hooper forecasts that global messaging revenues will comprise 11% of total cellular revenues by 2006, up from a global average of 2.7% in 2000.

And if our neighbors to the North reach that goal well before U.S. carriers do, you’ll know why.