The mobile phone industry is now celebrating the 15th anniversary of the Short Message Service Centre (SMSC).

SMSC is 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, one of Europe's leading network operators, according to a senior official.

Acision has evolved the SMSC infrastructure from a basic 'SMSC box' to a complete next generation, IP-based SMS architecture, centred on Acision's IP SMSC.

This enables text management, a wide range of differentiating service scenarios and a single rack capacity of 16,000 messages per second that can grow to virtually unlimited levels. SMSC innovation has never stopped, with current state of the art future-proof, IMS-enabled platforms that can help operators improve quality of service, reduce costs and offer exciting advanced messaging services. Its value today is as crucial to the market as ever before.

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.

Over the last 15 years Acision's SMSC has become the leader of the messaging market, as shown by their first ever customer Telenor who remains a customer to this day and has just deployed the most recent SMSC release, a testament to the value the SMSC has for operators offering a high-quality SMS experience. Acision's SMSCs are now responsible for processing more than half of all global SMS traffic.

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 per cent, SMSCs are vital to operators seeking to differentiate themselves through high-quality enhanced messaging services.

'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,' said managing director of Acision in the Middle East and North Africa Nabil Y Khalil.- Trade Arabia News Service