I agreed that something needs to give… There has to be lessons learned from other countries about how to provision short codes better and protect the carriers against lawsuits, thereby reducing the amount of regulations to adhere to.

Also (off topic, but), the recycled numbers list should be maintained in a way to allow numbers that are simply ported from one carrier to another, to retain all their SMS preferences (as would be expected) and not force content providers to wipe the slate clean.

Just an FYI, one of our PSMS subscription service shortcodes has just been approved on T-Mobile today, so the waiting may be over!

Chris
http://www.interlinked.mobi

First off, great article. On the outside from the carriers it seems incredulous that it takes so long to approve a short code. On the other hand, we should take a look at what the carriers are dealing with.

The carriers are being paid set fees by global aggregators to provide connectivity. Almost all fees charged per message are being charged by the aggregator, not the carriers. Thus the carriers are not making money from short code usage.

A few carriers charge to approve short codes; ATT and TMobile. Outside of this, it is a busy job for them to constantly be auditing and approving short codes to make sure they are compliant. The fees they hope to generate are from people texting on the end-user plans and not from fees generated by the aggregators being charged to the owner of the short code. But with 60% plus now on unlimited texting plans, are the carriers really in any rush to provide more texting services? Where is the money for them? We see where the money is for the aggregator, but where for the carrier?

What needs to happen in this industry is not have the carriers charge an extra fee per SMS going through a short code like Verizon proposed, but to have the global aggregators share in the messaging fees with the carriers. Make it lucrative for the carriers to approve short codes faster, as they will be getting a direct cut on usage from the end user and marketer.

However, the way it stands currently, with the aggregators making the largest chunk, the carriers have no incentive for a quick and easy approval. Should a carrier hire more employees to make this process faster when they aren’t being adequately compensated for this?

We need to see the carriers and aggregators come together to form some kind of a sharing of messaging fees that promotes a win/win for both sides. With the current fee structure, once again, the carriers have very little incentive to push through short code activations. So the end marketer, needing the short code, ends up losing out.

If we can get fees down for marketers while making it attractive to both the aggregators and carriers, we would see a quicker and smoother approval process. Both the carrier and the aggregator need to be rewarded for a quick approval. Currently, only the aggregator wins with speed.