Traffic licence fees removed for SMS infrastructure

Dublin, 27th January 2009: Anam, a pioneer of the value-added SMS services market, has today announced another pioneering move by removing the charge for capacity licences for its Eclipse SMSX short messaging platform. The move frees up operators from the worry and cost of buying additional licences as SMS traffic volumes increase, allowing them to simply and easily introduce more SMS based services.

Previously, SMS infrastructure has been priced on a volume basis with mobile operators paying higher license fees if they wanted their network to be able to process more messages. This meant that every time there was an increase in volume, operators’s costs also increased.

The new fee structure applies to all deployments of Anam's Eclipse SMSX short messaging platform. Whether it is used as a First Delivery Attempt (FDA), a regular SMSC, or as an SMS Router, there will be no charge for capacity licences. Anam’s new pricing means that there is no CAPEX cost for software if operators grow their SMS traffic.

“This is the 18th year that Anam’s engineers have been involved in the design and development of Short Messaging systems and in that time usage and volumes have grown dramatically,” said Gerry McKenna, CEO of Anam. “Although the capacity of messaging systems has grown to meet this demand, the cost of purchasing and maintaining high performance SMS platforms has remained high. This has limited the potential growth of  SMS-borne services such as funds transfer, content distribution, parental control and advertising-funded SMS.”

Over the last few years, even with the introduction of new data services, text messaging has continued to grow and grow in popularity. Across the world, over two trillion messages are sent annually. Consumers are very comfortable using the 160 character format and regularly state that it is the second most important application on their mobile, after voice calls.

“Anam believes that SMS and SMS-based services will continue to grown in popularity,” McKenna continued. “We believe that by offering this innovative new pricing structure, Anam is again at the forefront of the next stage of worldwide short message service growth.”

This move will offer hope to consumers that find many new services for their phone too complicated to use. With the costs removed for additional SMS traffic, mobile operators can now explore new ways to utilise the massively popular service.

As the market adjusts to the new pricing model this move will also offer advantages to other providers of SMS-based services. Whether they are question and answer services, voice-to-text services, or any other, operators will now be able to promote increased usage of these services without incurring higher traffic costs.

Anam’s Eclipse SMSX short messaging platform has exceptional performance and field-proven reliability. It can be deployed in clusters of low-cost Linux-based platforms supporting tens of thousands of message delivery attempts per second. Eclipse SMSX can be deployed alongside existing SMS platforms to quickly deploy new short messaging services or to provide additional capacity in rapidly growing networks.

You can find out more from Anam at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona from 16th-19th February. Anam will be exhibiting at the event and you can visit Anam in Hall 1, Stand F17.