ITWire

What really held SMS back in Australia in the early days was the fact that messages could not be sent between networks, despite the clear revenue potential. In late 1999, Exchange said that a new report on mobile telephony from the ITU "presents a powerful argument for inter-network short message services - currently not available in Australia because of opposition from one of the three carriers." The ITU report claimed: "in the Nordic countries, SMS now contributes around 20 percent of mobile revenue."

And Australian carriers would have done well to heed the words or Henrik Palsson, the head of Ericsson's Consumer Lab market research unit. He said the company's research had shown that the "killer app" for mobile phones in the generation Y market could be SMS: "teenage users prefer the more cryptic option of short messages on cellphone screens to talking."

Finally, in April 2000, and with great fanfare, Australia's three mobile operators turned on inter-carrier SMS. Atug gave vent to the frustration that had been building for years. "The long-awaited announcement by Optus, Telstra and Vodafone that they are to provide intercarrier mobile short messaging service across their networks, is most welcome...At last the concept of any-to-any connectivity, the cornerstone of telecommunications law in Australia, has reached the messaging environment. Why this agreement has taken eight years to reach is anybody's guess...Global interworking of the short messaging service no doubt forced Australian carriers to co-operate."

Atug went to hope for more, saying: "this new and long-overdue atmosphere of co-operation may well lead to the much sought after inter-carrier roaming between domestic carriers, where a customer can use an alternative network when theirs does not provide coverage to the particular location." As I predicted, correctly, at the time "not much chance of that."