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NowSMS Support Forums ⬆ NowSMS Support - SMS Issues ⬆ Archive through February 02, 2006 ⬆ |
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| Author | Message | |||
| sarah New member Username: Sarahsarahsarah Post Number: 1 Registered: 01-2006 |
Hi! I was just wondering how ISMS Aggregators work? Apparently, one of the identified risks for telco / mobile companies is that these aggregators can unknowingly "terminate" ISMS to the said telco. As such, this can cause bypassed traffic leading to congestion in the network. How can these be possible? I just can't put two and two together here. Does this mean these aggregators have the capacity to terminate ISMS to certain telcos and how would they do that? Please enlighten me on the ISMS aggregators, how it works, its function (well i could just think in parallel here - hubbing) and risks you can identify that mostly likely will affect other carriers. | |||
| Bryce Norwood - NowSMS Support Board Administrator Username: Bryce Post Number: 5498 Registered: 10-2002 |
Hi Sarah, To simplify things greatly ... This is all generally covered by complex webs of roaming and interconnection agreements. One party partners with another party, and then those parties partner with others, and so on. When you talk about delivering SMS messages to a subscriber of a mobile operator, there are generally two paths that can be taken. One path is specifically for SMS messages, where the message gets routed to one of the operator's SMSCs for delivery. The other path is to come in over a roaming link via SS7 (you need to have an agreement in order to do this) where the external operator's SMSC performs the message delivery directly. Generally speaking, when a message comes in over one of these roaming/external links, the operator charges a termination fee to allow the message to be delivered. Aggregators that perform direct delivery like this usually have partnerships with smaller mobile operators (for example, look at the aggregators partnering with opeators in Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man) ... and work with those operators to establish the necessary agreements. Can it be done unknowingly? Well, I'd say that it probably gets harder and harder every day. SMS is a big money maker for the mobile operators, and they have a vested interest in monitoring the traffic coming into their network to ensure that no one finds a backdoor. Operators also have a vested interest in providing better QoS for messages that they can deliver directly. Anyway ... lots of issues here ... but I need to get back to answering technical support questions about our products. -bn | |||
