How To Make A Standard As Interoperable As SMS

Why can’t people make systems interoperate as easily as SMS does on mobile phones? It turns out making SMS interoperable required some design decisions and some luck that might not be so readily available if you aren’t designing from scratch. And even today operational necessities mean SMS is not necessarily universally applicable; for example sending SMS messages between Europe and the USA can still be precarious and unreliable even after decades of experience.

1. First SMS was designed into the GSM specification from the beginning and did not have to be retrofitted so as to make existing systems connect.
2. Second SMS was not considered an important part of the architecture at design time and so the political contention over its design was reduced.
3. Third, the scope of SMS is significantly limited both in terms of the length of the message and in terms of the range of the media that can be transmitted.

In a situation with a similar profile – an international standard negotiated as a side-capability from requirements upwards by a small community of peer vendors without requiring compatibility with existing systems – undoubtedly interoperability could easily be mandated. Even so, there would still be a challenge related to vendor deployment of systems complying with the standard, and with their interconnection which would still be subject to case-by-case commercial negotiation.

(Originally posted to a test-blog on 27-Jun-22)