They’re unavoidable. Everywhere you turn, you’re hearing and reading about—and most likely sending and receiving—more text messages than ever before. According to CTIA’s Semi Annual Wireless Survey, 75 billion messages were recorded in June alone, averaging about 2.5 billion messages per day.

Coming hot off the Barack Obama presidential campaign, which set new benchmarks for messaging as a premier promotional channel and elevated text to an entirely new level, those numbers are projected to continue to grow. However, the success of the Obama text campaign also shed light on the challenges many operators will face as they anticipate more high-volume campaigns similar to Obama’s.

As this new wave of mobile promotion begins to take off, the question now remains if mobile operators can handle this explosion of messaging traffic—and if so, at what cost? Do they have the infrastructure in place to keep up with the volume, manage traffic efficiently, and maintain subscriber loyalty?

To stay ahead of the messaging explosion without incurring ghastly capital expenditures, wireless carriers have to start implementing structures and adopting open technologies and architectures that can manage a higher influx of messaging traffic and address current and future market demands. Yet the reality is that carriers cannot at this time abandon infrastructures that are already in place.

It is now crucial for operators to find a solution that can be customized and built upon the current infrastructure, providing the ability to manage messaging traffic and unmatched scalability as messaging continues to soar. The solution lies in tiered-based messaging services. By leveraging tiers, carriers have the freedom to keep their existing infrastructure by enabling a modular evolution.

In moving away from antiquated, silo-based messaging and to a tiered modular infrastructure, operators have a cheaper and more flexible way to manage and service and future deployment. This will in turn allow operators to stay ahead of the influx in traffic, optimize their messaging revenue, and ultimately maintain better subscriber loyalty.

Four tiers should be in place to optimize messaging performance and keep capital and operational expenditures at a minimum:

• • Access and delivery: integrating messaging components to the core network via standard interfaces
• • Control: providing network and business logic to route messages to subscribers and/or applications
• • Storage: storing traffic that isn’t delivered on first attempt
• • Application: executing the logic for high-value combinational messaging services incorporating network enablers (i.e., presence) to execute the message

A tiered architecture will enable operators to independently scale any of these four tiers across the infrastructure to support SMS, MMS, and other forms of messaging without incurring the costs of over-buying capacity for any one service or infrastructure tier. It is critical now for operators to stand up and take notice of new options for message management before the challenges become too costly and great to resolve.

Jay Seaton is the chief marketing officer of Airwide Solutions (www.airwidesolutions.com). He is a past member of the Board of Directors of the Association of Internet Professionals. He can be reached at info@airwidesolutions.com.

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