MobileSpring Inc. and InphoMatch Inc., rival vendors for short message service interoperability solutions, have been working together during the past few months to ensure their cross-carrier messaging systems are themselves interoperable.
The teaming comes as no real surprise. By making sure their systems can work together-a process dubbed “peering”-both InphoMatch and MobileSpring can assure their carrier customers of true cross-network interoperability.
“If you don’t cooperate with your competition, things don’t work,” said Mark Caron, MobileSpring’s president and chief executive officer.
Vendors throughout the wireless industry must engage in similar procedures. For example, companies that provide GPRS roaming exchanges, or GRXs, also must conduct peering meetings among themselves, and even have gone so far as to select a city-Amsterdam-as the location for such agreements.
MobileSpring jointly offers its Metcalf Global Messaging interoperability product with its partner, VeriSign Inc. a subsidiary of Illuminet. The company has deals with Cingular Wireless and Sprint PCS. InphoMatch manages SMS interoperability services for VoiceStream Wireless Corp. and for AT&T Wireless Services Inc., which in November was the first carrier to launch inter-carrier text messaging. Colin Matthews, InphoMatch’s president and CEO, promised the company will announce two more carrier customers for messaging interoperability this month.
The analyst community has pointed to SMS interoperability as a main reason behind the success of text messaging services in Europe and Asia. Messaging interoperability allows subscribers from one carrier to send text messages to subscribers of a different carrier using only a phone number. Prior to offering cross-carrier messaging, subscribers had to address text messages with the server address of the recipient’s carrier, an obscure and time-consuming process.
The carriers “have finally stepped up in recent months” by offering cross-carrier messaging, said MobileSpring’s Caron. “It’s all been very encouraging.”
InphoMatch and MobileSpring realized late last year they would need to peer their systems when it became clear that neither would be able to dominate the market and sign up all the carriers onto one interoperability system. Soon after, the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association and the SMS Forum-a group of messaging infrastructure vendors formed to address the technical details of disparate SMS services-got involved in the peering process, offering guidelines and documents to promote an open standards environment. For the past six weeks, InphoMatch and MobileSpring have held weekly conference calls to address the technical details of a peering arrangement, and last month the companies conducted a small-scale trial of the peering.
“We’ve been testing in a lab environment with them (InphoMatch) and we’re in the process of implementing the commercial version,” Caron said, adding that the commercial version could be introduced as soon as this month.
