What viable opportunities exist for the expansion of SMS? It seems impossible that SMS could be any more widespread, but at a panel event held last night in London, held to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the sending of the first ever GSM text message (the Crystal Anniversary, we reckon), industry figures each iterated their vision for increasing usage of SMS services.
The debate took place at an event organised by Airwide Solutions, whose engineer Neil Papworth sent the very first GSM text message to Vodafone's Richard Jarvis 15 years ago, wishing him "Happy Christmas". Both Papworth and Jarvis were present at the Airwide event, which doubled as a 15th birthday party for SMS.
Mike Short, speaking with his Mobile Data Association hat on, highlighted enterprise and business use of SMS as one area where usage is not as high as it could be. And Paul Gill, head of premium SMS/MMS at Vodafone, reckoned there's plenty of scope for growth left in use of SMS for the delivery of content and premium rated services.
But could it be that it is the operators themselves that are standing in the way of future SMS growth? It sounds paradoxical, but in at least two of the areas identified there is a view that there is more the operators themselves could do to foster growth.
To take enterprise usage – Short disagreed with the supposition that enterprise use of SMS as a business tool is already widespread. "I think that's one sector where take-up has been slower than it could have been," he said. Short identified CRM application integration as one area ripe for growth.
But is there enough trust in SMS for mission and business critical solutions – and can businesses be offered guarantees or even priority delivery of SMS for internal or external communications?
Michael Kowalzik, ceo of enterprise SMS provider Tyntec, agreed with Short that enterprise usage is still underwhelming.
"I definitely agree with that," he said. "It is still an undeveloped area and there's great opportunities for enterprises to use SMS to integrate customers closer into their business."
Citing the fact that P2P use is still 50-100 times bigger than enterprise usee, Kowalzik continued, "There are two key reasons for that. The first is that SMS so far has not provided the reliability needed by business users. The second is that enterprises themselves still need to understand what is possible with SMS." For example, an airline could use SMS not only for check-in, but actually to deliver boarding cards, he said, and there are lots of other enterprise applications that could be integrated with SMS.
As for reliability, not surprisingly Kowalzik made the point that a service provider like Tyntec, which has its own managed SMS network through SS7 links into smaller network operators, can provide much higher speeds and reliability than an individual operator, which can de facto only offer guarantees within its own network. He claimed that Tyntec offers SLAs that will back up delivery of 99.9995 of messaged within 15 seconds. Figures show that 97% of "normal" SMS arrive within 145 seconds, he said.
Still, Kowalzik added that whereas P2P SMS is set to grow only by 50% over the next five years, enterprise usage will jump 500% in that time.
Premium take rate
As for the increased use of SMS for content delivery and payement, Vodafone's Gill admitted that there was still work to be done winning back public trust around premium SMS, but he denied claims that operators were stunting potential further growth of the service by taking too much of a slice of revenues.
Helen Keegan, boss of mobile marketing agency Beep Marketing, disagreed, though. Yes, the UK operators take a lower rate than others, but using other countries' rates is no excuse, she told Mobile Europe afterwards. She also made the point that although operators' rates may well be reasonable, their partners have little means of knowing why, given they don't receive justification for where the money goes.
"If operators can justify their revenue share agreements then they could be more clear about the reasons for that justification," she said.