Canada’s wireless industry set to unveil inter-carrier SMS with United States
The Canadian wireless industry is preparing to announce an inter-carrier SMS agreement with national wireless operators in the United States in the coming weeks, Report on Wireless has learned. Details of the agreement are still unclear at this point, but the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association tells RoW that carriers on both sides of the border are completing technical trials of the service and that the agreement will be publicly announced in the near future.
Last April, Canada’s four national wireless operators began offering inter-carrier text messaging capabilities after years of only allowing consumers to "text" subscribers of the same carrier (RoW, April 16/02 and Nov. 13/01). Last month, the CWTA reported that text messaging traffic (the number of text messages sent and received) increased by approximately 98% from April to November 2002 (RoW, Dec. 9/02).