Will Success Spoil SMS?
Signaling-monitoring solutions can help carriers with SMS challenges such as bandwidth demand, message verification and QoS.
Increasing Bandwidth Demand
The elegance as well as limitations of delivering short messages comes from the fact that these messages are carried on the SS7 signaling network. This allowed carriers to offer the ability to send and receive text messages to and from mobile telephones quickly and cost-effectively. For subscribers, this means that they can send and receive SMS while they are on a voice, circuit-switched data or fax call. However, the signaling channel is used for multiple purposes besides SMS such as call-completion management and mobility management. Considering the staggering growth in SMS service, carriers are concerned about potential service outages due to over use of scarce signaling resources. Some already have limited the number of messages people can send. SS7 network planning has become business-critical to accommodate SMS traffic. Even if there are only minor QoS issues due to the degradation in service, the financial impact could be tremendous. In most of Europe and parts of Asia, visitors to a carrier’s network, typically high-margin customers, can switch to competitors within seconds if their calls and SMS messages are not successful. In addition, interconnect partners may not pay termination charges for SMS messages that were not delivered.
To measure the usage of the SS7 network and to effectively plan for growth in SMS traffic as well as voice traffic, carriers are relying on SS7 monitoring solutions. These solutions provide them with information in real time for operational purposes as well as allowing them to study the trends and plan for growth.
SMS Verification
Many changes are taking place in the way the mobile carriers charge each other to receive SMS messages, which could spell the end of free services. As SMS traffic has soared, so has the cost to provide this service. Most carriers worldwide have typically charged each other by volume of traffic, but the booming popularity of the messages has forced them to levy a charge for each message.
For instance, carriers in the United Kingdom now are charging each other 3 pence per message. This would have a great impact on other low-cost networks such as in Germany, where the carriers will be stuck with hefty bills for carrying SMS traffic to the United Kingdom.
Even in the United States, some GSM carriers are paying transit carriers for the signaling bandwidth used. Most GSM carriers worldwide are having to pay the interconnecting fixed carrier for transporting SMS messages over the signaling network. If these carriers have to settle with other carriers for each message sent or the signaling bandwidth used, they need visibility into their network boundaries with this granularity. Again, many carriers are relying on SS7-monitoring solutions to provide such intelligence at a business level. These solutions can provide a carrier with the critical information needed for each interconnect and roaming partner to make such settlements.
SMS QoS
SMS, first introduced to the United Kingdom on a mass-market basis in 3Q98, has had a substantial impact on growth in wireless subscribers. In addition to the take-up of SMS and substantially lower pricing resulting from 1999 price wars between carriers, the marketplace has seen subscriber totals nearly double with the strongest increase in the youth market. SMS has been quite rewarding to carriers in this regard. At the same time, there is underlying expectation from carriers that the messages definitely will be delivered to the recipient.
SMS has been designed to take the burden of message delivery and delivery verification away from the user through features such as store-and- forward and confirmation of delivery. For operations, customer satisfaction and billing purposes, carriers would like to know the success rate of SMS messages. When subscribers send or receive SMS messages, interconnecting networks send invoices to carry the traffic, and carriers would want to be sure that these networks actually are delivering these messages. At the same time, they would want to ensure that high-end subscribers, roamers and visitors are satisfied with their SMS deliveries.
Signaling-monitoring solutions provide SMS count for all originating and terminating messages for each network, actual delivery count and the bandwidth occupied by this traffic. Carriers then can verify the SMS QoS of their own networks as well as other interconnect networks.
A Medium for New Services
SMS is a simple and cost-effective medium of communications, not just for subscribers sending messages to each other, but for carriers to communicate with their subscribers, roamers and visitors.
As most carriers attempt to attract visitors to their networks, effective communications with these individuals becomes essential. At the end of the day, it is subscribers’ perceptions of a carrier’s service (quality, price and brand) that can affect the percentage of users that manually select a carrier’s network. Marketing and branding play a key role in attracting new visitors.
“SMS welcome service” as it is commonly referred to, is an extremely powerful communications tool as it addresses the right customers at the right time with the specifically needed information.
Carriers can send “welcome” messages to incoming visitors and “bon voyage” as they leave their network. At the same time, messages can be sent in country-specific languages to the visitors along with short codes for premium and value-added services. This helps carriers improve customer satisfaction, reduce churn and increase network usage.
Complete SMS message-generation solutions are available where a subscriber’s location is determined, and according to specified logic, SMS messages are generated and sent to roamers and visitors through a carrier’s existing SMS center.
M-commerce services such as banking, trading, ticketing and shopping are expected to proliferate and will generate additional revenue for carriers. Similarly location-based services such as travel, yellow pages, restaurant guides and hotel bookings will add to the bottom line. Initially, most of these services will use SMS messages as a method of communications and transactions. These personalized and location-specific information services will undoubtedly increase subscriber and visitor loyalty.
For most of the lucrative services — for example, local restaurant and hotel information — travelers in a carrier’s network need not wait for expensive location platforms, network modifications and compatible terminals. The location information of subscribers is available today in an economical form: from a carrier’s existing signaling network. SMS message generation that is location-specific can be considered as a solution to enable innovative services in an economical fashion.
One capability of the combined SMS and SS7 monitoring solution that has yet to be widely exploited is that a subscriber’s home network can monitor the location of subscribers that have roamed onto other networks and still communicate with them. This feature can be used to boost revenues by providing a range of new services. These might include local hotel and restaurant information, advice on which network provides the best service or lowest rates for the country visited and numbers to dial to access services provided by the home network. Travelers to a foreign country probably would prefer to deal with a single trusted source of information worldwide.
SMS Spam Detection
The expression “No good deed goes unpunished” hits home with mobile carriers. With all the convenience provided by this service, it can become a nuisance for subscribers when they receive unsolicited advertisements on their phones. Even worse, it can become a service-affecting issue for carriers if certain businesses or individuals send mass SMS messages to multiple subscribers in a short period of time. Such conditions can overload the SMS center and prohibit legitimate SMS messages from being delivered; however, they can be detected and alarmed by the signaling-monitoring solutions.
Evolution of Messaging
Mobile messaging is evolving beyond text from SMS to enhanced messaging service (EMS) and then on to multimedia messaging service (MMS). EMS offers the ability to send an integrated message including simple images, sounds, animations, and modified and standard text for display on EMS-compliant handsets. Although EMS is an enhancement to SMS, it still uses store-and-forward SMS centers and the SS7 network to deliver messages. As with most other non-voice mobile services, wide availability of compliant handsets will determine the success of EMS. The business issues surrounding SMS will remain similar for EMS.
MMS will provide an ideal migration path to take advantage of the bearer capacity that 3G IMT2000 networks supply. However, the delay in MMS is likely to be prolonged as new networks have to be in place, MMS terminals must reach certain penetration, and new service infrastructure such as MMS relay, MMS server, MMS user databases and new WAP gateways are to be deployed. As the name suggests, MMS provides the ability to send and receive multimedia messages consisting of text, sounds, images and video to MMS-capable handsets. MMS does retain some of the characteristics of SMS, such as the non-real-time nature, store-and-forward capability and person-to-person communications.
However, unlike SMS and EMS, the delivery of MMS messages is over traffic channels. These are designed to carry a range of data services in GPRS and UMTS networks, with higher capacity and no likelihood of congestion. As with SMS and EMS, the business drivers will be similar, but now to provide the intelligence to determine packet QoS, intercarrier settlement for multimedia traffic and the like, the signaling-monitoring platforms will have to monitor more than just SS7 signaling. Managing SS7 and IP convergence is a greater task for both carriers and the vendors.
Messaging will evolve beyond SMS, but for the next five years, until mass penetration of GPRS and UMTS is established, SMS will continue to experience strong growth. Many third-party content providers will offer services that are delivered via SMS. Carriers will continue to look for ways to enhance profitability from this service. Many of these carriers will be pleasantly surprised by the intelligence they can gather from signaling networks and the value this adds to SMS delivered services.
Marwaha is Inet (www.inet.com) market strategies director.
