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HSL Delivers the Message.

Article on HSL featuring in MXtra, the publication of the MX Alliance, in a special edition for the 3GSM World Congress in Cannes.

Edinburgh, Scotland, 14th February 2005

Despite the arrival of picture messaging and more recently video messaging, SMS text messaging usage is continuing to grow dramatically. The Mobile Data Association predicts that the number of text messages sent in the UK will top 30 billion by the end of 2005. This growth prediction no doubt makes Mark Hay, Managing and Technical Director of HSL a very happy man.

HSL provides a fast, efficient and very reliable mobile messaging service and infrastructure and is set to take advantage of this continued strong growth in messaging.

"Person-to-person messaging is still the major growth area, but more and more businesses are realising that mobile messaging provides a very fast and lower cost communication channel to communicate and interact with customers, their staff or telematics devices," said Mark. "Our key objective is to allow our customers to quickly and easily integrate these messaging requirements and provide them with outstanding levels of reliability in sending and receiving messages."

Because of the large numbers of operators in any country, and the need to send messages globally, companies often need to negotiate multiple contracts and in addition deal with the technical complexity.

"HSL provides a global messaging solution to any network all from a single service," said Mark. "That saves companies a tremendous amount of time and is a much more cost-effective way of delivering and receiving message due to the complexity of terminating charges and so on."

Reliability

"We have a strong reputation for the high quality and reliability of our systems and our service, and we pride ourselves on being able to provide one of the most robust and consistently reliable messaging services in the marketplace."

"Our systems are based in three geographically separate and independent sites, two located in the UK and a third site we have just added in Virginia, USA to give even more resilience. Our advanced infrastructure means that any unlikely failure of a single site will not affect overall service availability. Our systems are well-equipped to deal with large quantities of traffic, and as such have high capacity and very rarely experience any problems. The service availability guarantee is part of the Service Level Agreement (SLA) and is stated as 99.9%. However, actual availability across our service sites has been 100% over the past 6 months."

Making the connection

HSL have also recently added their own SMSC which provides closer and more direct communication between software applications and mobile networks. This has allowed HSL to capitalise on the infrastructure they already had in place and allowed them to add new applications to their service portfolio.

With HSL's investment in their own SMSC, they have increased technical capability to control messages being communicated between applications and mobile devices on a global scale. The SMSC is located directly on the SS7 network, and customers can therefore now be more directly connected with the global mobile messaging infrastructure, resulting in a more reliable one-way and two-way SMS service, with faster message delivery. As a direct result, HSL's competitive position has greatly increased within the industry, providing SMS customers with a technically advanced, first-class carrier-grade service.

"The addition of a third system site in North America is great news for our customers and so far the response has been very positive," said Mark. "We have just reduced our prices as well which should allow us to attract additional customers - I think the market for business text messaging will really take off in 2005."

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HSL Delivers the Message