Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Get the message, eh?

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Feb 2003 20:29:05 -0500

Get the message, eh?

February 7, 2003 2:24pm

Like children stuck in the back of the family's ride as it careens toward a vacation
destination that seems
light-years away, North American wireless users eager to exchange intercarrier short
messaging service
(SMS) text messages have been asking of carriers: Are we there yet?

The classic response is: soon.

But unlike frazzled parents aching for a
moment's peace, wireless carriers in both the
U.S. and Canada actually seem to mean it. In
late January, the Canadian Wireless
Telecommunications Association (CWTA) and
the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet
Association (CTIA) announced SMS
interoperability between the four major
Canadian carriers — Bell Mobility,
Rogers/AT&T, Telus Mobility and Microcell —
and the Big Six in the U.S.: AT&T Wireless,
Verizon Wireless, Sprint, Cingular, Nextel and
T-Mobile.

SMS has traditionally lagged in North America
because wireless services are provisioned over
several technology platforms. In contrast,
European carriers agreed early on that GSM — which had SMS capability built into it from
the beginning —
would be the standard platform. Consequently, while Europeans could exchange SMS messages
from the
beginning — regardless of carrier — wireless customers in North America only could
exchange them with
users who subscribed to the same carrier, which put a giant crimp in the service's
commercial potential.

That changed in April 2002 when the CWTA brokered a deal with the four major Canadian
providers to route
SMS messages through a gateway manufactured by Addison, Texas-based LogicaCMG Wireless
Networks
and positioned in Toronto.

When a subscriber sends an SMS message, it first goes to a service center maintained by
the subscriber's
carrier. The service center determines whether the recipient's 10-digit number is one
issued by the carrier. If
it isn't, the message is sent downstream via dedicated IP circuits to the LogicaCMG
gateway, which then
routes the message to the appropriate receiving carrier's service center. The message is
then sent to the
recipient's handset. The gateway executes all of the necessary translations and billing
settlements, and
packages each message in a way that is consistent with the parameters set by the receiving
carrier.

Results have been nothing short of spectacular. The CWTA said the volume of SMS messages
sent within
Canada has grown by 98% since last April, with more than 20 million messages sent in
November alone.
The biggest reason for the initiative's success is that the four carriers worked out their
differences before
finding a gateway provider, according to Adel Bazederghi, director of wireless product
development for Bell
Mobility.

“Getting everybody to agree beforehand on what the objectives were, and setting
expectations among the
four carriers, went a long way in avoiding the bickering,” Bazederghi said. “Everyone knew
what was at
stake.”

About three months after interoperability was achieved in Canada, the CTIA accomplished a
similar goal in
the U.S. working with the Big Six, though the path was slightly different. Instead of
using a single common
gateway, each carrier found its own gateway provider. Nevertheless, the routing function
in the U.S. works
pretty much the same as it does in Canada. And the results have been equally impressive.
According to the
CTIA, 1 billion SMS messages were sent by wireless subscribers in the U.S. in June 2002,
compared with
30 million in June 2001.

Those numbers should jump some more as interoperability among the major carriers spreads
throughout
North America. And it's about time, according to William Dudley, LogicaCMG's product
manager.

“When I call you on the phone, I don't know who your carrier is, and I don't care,” he
said. “The same thing
should apply to text messaging.”

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