The Joy of Text and Telecommunications Competition

By: Gary McManus

Text Messaging is huge; that's stating the obvious, but did you know how huge it is?

The body that regulates text messaging in Ireland is the Commission for Communications Regulation (ComReg). ComReg is the statutory body responsible for the regulation of the electronic communications sector, including: telecommunications, radio communications and broadcasting transmission, and the postal sector in Ireland. According to ComReg figures there are 3.1 million mobile phone users in Ireland, there are over 242.5 million text messages sent each month and over 15 million text messages were sent last New years eve! The technology behind text messaging is called the Short Message Service or SMS.

The popularity of this SMS culture could be attributed to the fact that SMS conversations are excellent time-fillerS often used while in transit, or the fact that SMS conversations can be carried out in private even when the users are in public, noisy environments.

The brevity allowed in an SMS message allows the sender to initiate a cheap communications link-up without the need for starting a more expensive voice call. c u l8r or flix 2night? or pint ?? are all messages that fit the SMS format perfectly.

Recently a new type of text message has become available and is gaining in popularity - that is the premium text message. Premium text messages are also regulated by ComReg and you may already have used them if for example you sent a text message to vote for a contestant on a TV show such as Big Brother or Pop Idol, or if you send a text with the answer to the competition on the Eamonn Dunphy TV show.

Premium text messaging is a very important innovation in the telecommunications industry because it enables independent companies that come up with unique ideas that add value to business or social life, to be able to launch these as services and provide them to the public in competition with the major operators Vodafone, O2 and Meteor. Competition has played an important part in improving the quality of telecommunications service and price in Ireland over the past 10 years.

And although many people believe that there is still not enough competition in this market because prices are too high, we as a public are still far better off for what competition there is remember the days of a six week wait (and more) to get a telephone installed in a home?

The TSSG as part of its role of disseminating the results of its research into the community, for the benefit of the community, has recently established a company called Aceno (pronounced A See No) to provide a range of telecommunications services to the region, these include business services, college services and club services, personal services, and corporate services. See www.aceno.com for more information and over the next few weeks we will tell you more about this.

In the meantime we'd like to announce a service that Aceno is providing for the TSSG. It's called TSSG alerts. You subscribe to TSSG alerts by texting: SUB TSSG to 53331; Once subscribed the TSSG will send you a weekly update on the leading stories in the IT and Telecommunications field. Full details on this service are provided in the TSSG banner at the end of this article.

This opening up of the telecommunications network to competition is an increasingly important area of TSSG research and commercial development. The TSSG has a number of research projects ongoing at the moment, which support this including the Opium project which is a pan-European trial of 3G (3rd Generation) mobile technologies. The TSSG leads this very important EU EUR8 million project. The project has 20 partners including Vodafone, Motorola, Siemens, Nortel, Accenture, and many other major European organisations.

The essence of this project is to trial technologies such as OSA/Parlay and SIP, which will help further open up telecommunications network to 3rd party service providers (independent companies) thus creating more innovation and competition within the EU in Telecommunications services. More competition means more services for consumers, better services for consumers, and cheaper services for consumers. We here at the TSSG are proud to be part of this effort to improve competition in the Telecommunications market and thus provide the community with better and cheaper services!