A2P (Application to Person) messaging market is creating a huge business for global telecom operators.
The growth in A2P messaging is despite significant action from telecom regulators and poor response from wireless customers due to wanted messages on their smartphones and phones.
A2P messaging market is expected to increase by 20 percent to more than 2.7 trillion by 2022 from 2.1 trillion this year, according to Juniper Research.
Grey route traffic, defined as ‘A2P traffic veiled as P2P traffic’, will drop 11 percent between 2017 and 2022 as mobile operators will be tapping SMS firewall providers for detecting grey routes.
Total SMS traffic will exceed 30 billion messages per day in 2022. Mobile operators will start using AI (Artificial Intelligence) to efficiently analyse the high level of SMS traffic.
“Mobile operators are implementing these services to move possible grey route messages to directly connected routes,” said research author Sam Barker. “There will be enterprises which are unwilling to pay the additional fees for directly connected A2P services, and operators risk losing this business entirely.”
Mobile operators will start rolling out RCS (Rich Communication Suite) services in response to rising enterprise usage of OTT applications. RCS combines the high level of reach of SMS messaging and the rich functionality of OTT applications.
The increase of enterprise messaging over OTT applications will create a new use case for A2P SMS traffic. User verifications and OTPs (One Time Passwords) will require the ubiquitous nature of SMS services as a starting point. SMS will continue to be required as a fall back option against OTT applications.
In November 2017, Infobip, a cloud communications provider, said it has been delivering 4 billion A2P SMS per month across India since the start of this year, 30 percent of all A2P traffic in the region.
Infobip handles A2P SMS traffic from all mobile operators for their enterprise customers across the region.
Three major Indian operators including Aircel have adoped Infobip’s A2P SMS Business-as-a-Service solution. Infobip is working with operators to support their communications operations, engage with subscribers, and provide wholesale SMS support for their enterprise customers.
