SAN FRANCISCO—If Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign had been using technology from Interop Technologies, a lot more people might have gotten the VP text message.
Of course, that’s according to Interop. Nevertheless, the company said its SMSC 4 Series solution is so good, it could help in times of high-volume messages when carriers and their partners need to get the message out fast to a lot of people. In fact, Interop said tests in the lab show its SMSC 4 Series provides up to 36,000 message delivery attempts per second, more than doubling the highest SMSC throughput announced to date.
Will Hodgman, executive vice president of comScore, gave his nod of approval with a quote in an Interop press release, saying that kind of throughput level is an achievement for the industry. The technology is timely due to the surging demand for text messaging, he added. Gartner forecasts 2.3 trillion messages will be sent across major markets worldwide in 2008, a 19.6% increase from the 2007 total.
Interop representatives said it’s not just for election-related SMS messages, either. Weather and news alerts also can tax systems, especially during hurricane season, said Damian Sazama, vice president of marketing and product development. As for the Obama campaign, what would have happened had Interop’s solution been in place? “I think a lot more (messages) would have gone through,” he said.
To meet requirements for high-volume SMS campaigns, many wireless operators have scaled their capability by linking multiple SMSCs in daisy chains. That can lead to technical and human resource inefficiencies that increase operating costs and negatively affect reliability, according to Interop.
Interop has been making a push during CTIA I.T. & Entertainment to get its message to Tier 1 carriers. With real estate in a switch room being ever-important, Sazama points out that the gear doesn’t take up much space – the footprint consists of about two 18-inch racks. Carriers can install Interop’s solution or use its hosted service. The company has a facility in Atlanta, redundant to its center in Fort Meyers, Fla.