Novembber 7, 2001
In a move that promises to unify and strengthen the text messaging market, Canada's four wireless communications providers today announced a North American first. Bell Mobility, Microcell Connexions, Rogers AT&T Wireless and TELUS Mobility have joined forces to develop an initiative that will enable inter-carrier, mobile text messaging for digital wireless customers across Canada. CMG Wireless Data Solutions has been selected to provide the technology for the service.
SMS-based messaging allows mobile wireless customers to quickly send and receive short text messages to be viewed instantly on their wireless phones. Many wireless phones sold today in Canada have the feature, but the service is currently limited as customers can only communicate between customers on the same network. To overcome this limitation, the four major wireless 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 text messaging subscribers of these four carriers, coast-to-coast.
With this initiative, 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. Inter-carrier 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.
Today at 1:00 p.m. at the Metro Convention Centre in Toronto (South Building, Room 707) the four wireless carriers, CWTA and CMG will discuss this exciting announcement.
In just two years, the number of SMS messages sent worldwide has grown from 1 billion messages per month to more than 16 billion messages per month, and this is envisioned that this number will continue to grow. The continuing growth of SMS demonstrates that text messaging is now achieving mass market status in many markets of the world where the visual message is becoming as popular as voice.
"The explosive growth of SMS seen in Europe has been limited in North America largely due to technology barriers," said Mark Quigley, research director, Yankee Group Canada. "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 inter-carrier, multi-network mobile text messaging initiative. 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."
The four Canadian carriers have signed an agreement with CMG, which will use its Inter-SMSC Router (ISR) service to manage the SMS cross-carrier traffic. The service will bridge all of the leading mobile network technologies, including CDMA, GSM, iDEN and TDMA. Designed to operate on an independently hosted open platform, the service will encourage easy interconnection of carriers and scalable worldwide connection in the future. The strategy is to create seamless mobile text messaging to follow successful European trends. Interoperability has not been a barrier for carriers in Europe since they share the same network technology.
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