Telesoft aids SMS and USSD services growth in India

NEW DELHI, INDIA: Telesoft Technologies announced the introduction of the MILBORNE SMS USSD Gateway for the India market.

With a field proven open standard SMPP interface developers can create SMS applications such as bulk SMS broadcast/alert, mobile advertising and mass telephone voting as well as USSD applications like subscriber balance checks, prepaid top-up and menu driven information services such as weather, news, and sport. India has a rapidly growing subscriber base representing a huge opportunity for text services.

A high capacity cost effective solution, the MILBORNE Gateway allows application developers to rapidly deploy value added SMS (short message service) and USSD (unstructured supplementary service data) services into GSM networks via the use of an SMPP (short message peer to peer) interface.

“The SMPP interface is straight forward to use and hides the complexity of core network protocols”, said Mathew Downham, Channel Manager, Telesoft Technologies. “It reduces development time for new applications allowing a faster return on investment”.

Supporting both mobile originating (MO) and mobile terminating (MT) SMS applications the MILBORNE Gateway maps incoming texts to a virtual handset and acts as an SMSC for outgoing texts. A virtual HLR within the MILBORNE makes adding new virtual subscriber numbers easy, facilitating short duration activities such as competitions. The SS7 signalling interfaces allow very high SMS volumes with up to 100 different applications simultaneously supported.

USSD allows transmission of information over the signalling channel to the GSM network. USSD is session orientated, unlike SMS, which is a store-and-forward technology. Therefore response times for interactive applications are shorter for USSD than SMS. Typically incoming messages from the handset are fed to the relevant application. The application sends the user back a response in the form of a simple text reply or structured menu. Information flows in both directions and can be network or subscriber originated.

India is the world’s fastest growing wireless market with 15.64 million new subscribers in March making it 391.8 million, according to the newest available data from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India.