Mobile News

The service centre is designed to:

* submit a short message to a handset, retaining the responsibility for the message until the report has been received or the validity period expires

* receive a report from the mobile network

* receive a short message from a mobile handset

* return a report to the mobile network for a previously received short message.

To identify each short message sent to a mobile handset in a unique way, a time-stamp value is included in the field “service centre time stamp” (SCTS) of the message. The time stamp gives the time when the message arrived at the service centre to the accuracy of one second. If two or more messages to the same mobile station arrive at the service centre within one second, the service centre modifies the time stamp of those messages in such a way that all messages to the handset contain different time stamps and the modification of the time stamps is kept to a minimum.

The service centre is allowed to have only one outstanding short message (i.e. a message for which a report has not been received) to a specific handset at a given time. Finally, the service centre is able to initiate overwriting of short messages previously received if requested by the same originating address and message type.

The implications for mobile marketing campaigns of this message handling by the service centre are twofold:

* the time-stamp algorithm limits the message relaying speed of a service centre for a large number of short messages to the same number at approximately six messages per second, regardless of the SMS gateway connection speed

* in order to manage the responsibility for a large number of messages, the service centre uses queues that are typically capable of buffering 100 messages.

A service centre can be divided into several (virtual) service centres. Each virtual service centre may be configured by the cellco with different service settings, e.g. reverse-charging on or off. Cellcos divide the virtual service centres into private and public. As opposed to a private virtual service centre, the use of a public virtual service centre does not require service centre changes on the subscriber’s handset. The external application deployed behind a public virtual service centre is identified by a short number that is three to five digits long. A short number configured on a virtual service centre supports more than one connection from the external application managing the message. This feature is used by the service centre to load balance the message flow to the application across each connection and to increase the resilience by ignoring failed connections.

There are different physical ways to connect external applications to service centres that depend on the cellco–leased line, X.25, ISDN and TCP/IP are the most common.

These technical questions are addressed at the latest when filling out the request forms for large accounts. It will be up to an infrastructure team with knowledge of the SMS gateway’s capabilities to identify the appropriate connectivity options together with the cellco’s technicians.