The mobile phone industry is today celebrating the 15th birthday of the Short Message Service Centre (SMSC), the principal application behind text messaging first brought to market by Acision in 1992. The first ever SMSC was introduced as a product designed primarily to deal with the demands and improve reliability of a developing mobile industry, and in that year the first of many deals was signed with Telenor.

In 1992, SMSC version 1.0 had a capacity of 10 messages per second which was soon quickly surpassed through ongoing innovation to improve capacity, reliability and accessibility. By 1999 the mobile industry saw the introduction of the first high performance SMSC, also launched by Acision with what was then an incredible 50 fold capacity increase to 500 messages per second. Such capacity speeds have now been greatly exceeded by today’s further 32 fold capacity increase, achieved by the latest Acision IP SMSC.

Despite the rapid evolution of the mobile market, SMS is still the most important value-added service for operators. For operators looking to provide subscribers with robust messaging services, today’s mix and match platform means they can specify SMS capacity to meet their requirements. It is this scalability that makes the SMSC cost effective and adaptable to both growing and mature markets. Even in the most developed markets, such as Western Europe where SMS service penetration has reached 90%, SMSCs are vital to operators seeking to differentiate themselves through high-quality enhanced messaging services.

Steven van Zanen, VP Marketing for Intuitive Messaging at Acision commented: “Mobile messaging contributes significantly to the total mobile service revenues of almost every network operator on the planet, and the phenomenal evolution of the SMSC over the past 15 years has been a direct factor to the overall success of SMS. However, we’re not done yet, as Acision is constantly looking ahead with our open IP based architecture to improve performance without limits, enable new and converged services and continue building on our 15 year track record as the market leaders and innovators of SMS.”