Mobile Marketing: Achieving Competitive Advantage Through Wireless Technology
Printed with permission from Butterworth Heinemann, a division of Elsevier. Copyright 2006. "Mobile Marketing: Achieving Competitive Advantage Through Wireless Technology" by Alex Michael. For more information about this book, please visit Elsevier.
Understanding the wireless world
Messaging
Without doubt, one of the main areas of growth in the wireless world over the past
four or five years has been in messaging. To give you an idea of the vast numbers
of messages sent, on New Year's Eve 2004 alone in the UK 111 million SMS
messages were sent!
There are four main messaging technologies:
1. SMS
2. Smart messaging (from Nokia)
3. EMS (Enhanced Messaging System)
4. MMS
SMS was the first of these technologies to emerge, and it started life as a
straightforward person-to-person messaging service which succeeded because it
was simple to grasp and support for it was so widespread. SMS lets you send and
receive messages made up of text and numbers to and from mobile phones (and
specially equipped landlines). Nokia created an extension to SMS, called 'smart
messaging', that is available on more recent Nokia handsets. This form of
messaging can be used for Over The Air (OTA) phone configuration and updates,
picture messaging, logos and so on. The value of smart messaging is that messages
can be sent over the standard SMS infrastructure and therefore operators do not
need to upgrade their infrastructure. EMS emerged between SMS and MMS, and
allows the sending of relatively simple media and extended text messages. MMS
is a rich version of SMS; it has been accepted as standard by the 3GPP (the mobile
standards authority), and it enables the sending of sounds, pictures and video
to and between handsets. MMS messages take the form of short presentations,
and the use of MMS as a business tool is wide and varied – for example,
in animated business cards, greeting cards, cartoons and maps.
SMS
WHAT IS SMS?
The first SMS message was sent in December 1992 from a PC to a mobile phone
on the Vodafone network. SMS is currently one of the most widely used wireless
technologies, and its usage amongst phone users remains very high. It accounts
for around 60–80 per cent of average revenue per user (ARPU) and, though its
percentage of total ARPU is decreasing due to the emergence of other
communication technologies, its usage will remain steady. In the top 20 European
countries over 200 billion SMS messages are sent each month, but the usage of
SMS goes far beyond peer-to-peer communication; it is a great business tool for
interacting with end-users, and it provides a convenient and widely accepted way
of billing the user.
HOW AN SMS MESSAGE IS SENT
SMS messages are generally no more than 140–160 characters in length, and
contain no images or graphics. When a message is sent it is received by a Short
Message Service Center (SMSC), which must then get it to the appropriate mobile
device. To do this, the SMSC sends an SMS request to the home location register
(HLR) to find the roaming customer. Once the HLR receives the request, it will
respond to the SMSC with the subscriber's status: (1) inactive or active; and
(2) where the subscriber is roaming. If the response is 'inactive', then the SMSC
will hold onto the message for a period of time. When the subscriber accesses his or
her device, the HLR sends an SMS notification to the SMSC, and the SMSC will
attempt delivery. The SMSC transfers the message, in a short message delivery
point to point format, to the serving system. The system pages the device and,
if it responds, the message gets delivered. The SMSC receives verification that the
message has been received by the end-user, then categorizes the message as 'sent'
and will not attempt to send it again.
Read the rest of this excerpt and download Chapter 2: Understanding the wireless world
Read other excerpts and download more sample chapters from our CRM and call center bookshelf
To purchase the book or similar titles, visit Elsevier.
