Lots of changes are happening in traffic patterns these days, all related to the way people and servers use communications. In the global core networks, traffic once was dominated by traffic between enterprise computing centers, for example.

 

These days, traffic is disproportionately generated by people communicating with application servers, the result being that traffic is far more distributed as a rule, but also fairly concentrated at just a few companies such as Google and Yahoo, who run the servers supporting apps most people use.

 

Something along the same lines is happening in the text messaging market, says Alan Pascoe (News - Alert), Tekelec senior product marketing manager.

 

 "Globally, traffic growth is moving away from person-to-person traffic, which remains significant, but application traffic is growing at a higher rate," he said.

 

The reason is that companies and enterprises are using text messaging for notifications and appointment reminders, for example. All of that increases the number of server to mobile traffic, where traditionally text messaging has been one user sending a message to another user.

 

In many ways, the shifts are parallel. Though person-to-person communications remain important, more traffic is of the server-to-person sort. At the same time, there also is more machine-to-machine traffic, Pascoe said.

 

"One area where we are seeing definite growth is use of SMS as the basis for data services," he said.

 

One issue network providers have is the "always on" problem, where a connection has to be maintained continuously, straining the network and draining the mobile device's battery.

 

"So what is new is use of SMS to wake up a device or make a configuration change," Pascoe said. "It can be used as a control message that avoids tying up radio ports and network capacity while also avoiding stress on end user mobile batteries."  

 

Text messaging is finding new uses as a signaling mechanism to wake up an application and then trigger a multimedia message service download of a picture, for example.

The SMS message is used to trigger a download, in this case.

 

"One also can trigger roaming commands, or to change a mobile's preferences for which network to use first," Pascoe said.

 

Applications such as Twitter also are affecting the network and driving more SMS traffic, says Pascoe. In fact, real-time notifications of all sorts are using SMS as the messaging channel.

 

In the future, it will be easier for service providers to provide unified messaging across the existing silos that make instant messaging, email, text messaging and multimedia messaging different message formats. Ultimately, service providers will be able to handle all of them as a single message type, allowing users to correlate any message type, from any single person, in a unified messaging application.

 

Aside from the consumer benefits, service providers will find it cheaper and easier to manage all the messaging infrastructures, Pascoe said.