SMS Roaming White Paper

Roaming agreements are signed using complicated and time consuming procedures and it may take years for even large mobile networks to establish bilateral roaming agreements with most other networks worldwide.

In the meantime, the network operator customers are able to establish voice calls worldwide, but could only send SMS to a limited number of countries, leading to subscriber complaints and a revenue loss for the operator.

MCTEL operates its own SMS Centers directly connected to the SMS backbone and offers to the mobile network operators a SMS Roaming Platform able to route SMS to most networks worldwide (more than 600 operators are covered). Thanks to its SMS MO Forwarding feature, MCTEL Roaming Platform is not only able to convey SMS to countries/operators to which the sender network has no roaming agreements, but in most cases, replies could be received as well and will be transmitted to the SMS initial originator.

This document explains how to setup the interworking between the operator network and MCTEL SMS Roaming Platform. This operation is very straightforward and could usually be completed on a very short timeframe.