Tyntec, a telecom-web convergence company, said three quarters of mobile network operators are missing out on the chance to monetise application-to-person (A2P) SMS traffic that crosses their networks.
Research conducted for tyntec by UK-based analyst house mobileSquared found that, since 2012, no more than 25 per cent of operators have deployed new or updated SMS firewalls that would enable them to cash in on growing A2P SMS traffic.
Pre-2012 SMS firewalls lack the ability to provide visibility into messaging including detecting and controlling grey routes and other security threats, the companies stated. In contrast, next generation firewalls deployed from 2012 onwards offer the ability to identify legitimate SMS traffic that they can then monetise.
Stefan Kuehne, director of carrier management at tyntec, explained that SMS firewalls "pave the way for clean and legitimate A2P messaging growth," by enabling operators to "gain control over their A2P traffic" and open their networks to legitimate use cases that provides operators with "a termination fee for each message delivered to their subscribers."
Some 56 per cent of operators quizzed by mobileSquared and tyntec said their A2P SMS traffic grew by between 6 per cent and 36 per cent in the past year. In addition, figures from Ovum show that A2P SMS accounted for nearly a quarter (24 per cent) of total messaging traffic in 2014, the companies noted. That figure is set to grow to 31.3 per cent of all messaging traffic in 2017.
The research suggests that many operators are resisting investment in the equipment needed to monetise A2P SMS because they associate such traffic with increased spam and illegal messaging attacks on their subscribers, tyntec said.
However, Nick Lane, chief insight analyst at mobileSquared, said effective firewalls would alleviate those threats and provide operators with an alternative revenue stream that would enable them to compete with over-the-top (OTT) messaging services by leveraging the "even greater enterprise messaging traffic opportunity."
For more:
- see this tyntec announcement
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