Tech SMS

The Short Message Service (SMS) has over the past three years become a greater success with rapid growth in traffic levels. SMS has also expanded from GSM to encompass TDMA and CDMA networks. Nearly every network operator globally has developed a strategy to tap into the success of SMS. Network operators in North and South America are grappling with technology overlays and integration of various network technologies and properties as they try to implement national and local SMS roaming and seamless service access. Solutions have sprung up to provide this connectivity.

Meanwhile, a wide array of SMS related technologies and services have been developed, particularly as application developers and operators alike have refocused WAP investments in SMS. Everyone wants help developing SMS applications and deploying them.

As a result, a large number of SMS Center vendors are available, network operators in every region including Africa, the Middle East and South America have rapidly deployed SMS Centers and services.

Large network operators have started to look at if not yet demand signaling offload solutions as their SS7 networks have become congested. New vendors that are complementary to the core SMS Center vendors have sprung up to solve this problem. The SMS Center vendors have finally in the last year or so bought realtime SMS for prepay charging solutions to market.

SMS traffic continues to grow, new value added services are being launched, Enhanced Messaging and other SMS based services are putting more pressure on the signaling network. Meanwhile, the Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) is coming.

This is the market environment that the "Tech SMS" report is written in. It covers all of these and many other issues in detail. It presents a roadmap for continued SMS success over the next couple of years.