Many mobile operators are unaware that they are missing out on such revenues. SMS Aggregators have created a wholesale messaging business that bypasses the Operators messaging infrastructure and are able to push bulk marketing messages to consumers from off-shore mobile networks (known as “grey routes”) that do not pay SMS termination charges. As a result operators do not earn any revenue from this traffic.
Utilising Anam’s patented SMS Router as the underlying technology, ASSURE provides an intelligent and transparent routing platform to help operators identify and monetise SMS traffic which is arriving over grey routes. The solution which is also available as a managed service reports on inter-connect SMS traffic between all-partner and non-partner networks providing the operator with critical information allowing them to prioritise and handle the offending grey routes.
Mobile operators are also seeing increasing levels of spam and unwanted text messages being terminated on their network, which is damaging the operator’s reputation with the subscriber and could lead to lost revenues. Spam takes the form of messages from an anonymous or faked sender, often asking subscribers to reply to expensive, premium rate numbers, or messages that the subscriber views as offensive. Anam’s advanced filtering engine detects scanning, spoofing, faking and spam content and prevents it from reaching a subscriber’s mobile phone, thus improving a user’s experience, reducing levels of churn and protecting the operator’s network. Anam’s experience in this market, combined with intelligence gathered within the solution, ensures that potential attackers are discovered as early as possible and dealt with appropriately.
Brage Bjørntegaard, Product Manager SMS Access for Telenor commented: “Anam have provided the capabilities for operators, such as us, to detect, filter and block grey routes used for wholesale SMS traffic. In the past aggregators using these grey routes were able to benefit from off-shore messaging services that terminated bulk SMS messages to our subscribers without paying any termination fees. Today most of this traffic is now routed directly through our messaging infrastructure, allowing for us to collect the termination fees that we were previously missing out on.”
Louise O’Sullivan, Chief Executive Officer of Anam Technologies said: “Based on our customer deployments, we have been able to identify a black hole in mobile operator revenues because they are being cut out of the bulk messaging chain, despite the SMS’ being pushed through to its end subscribers. In some case we have seen that operators have suffered with a revenue leakage in excess of €24m a year. In times of economic constraints, operators cannot afford to lose out on these revenues.”