Submitted by Mike Grenville on Thu, 02 Dec 2004 12:06

Infrastructure vendor Telsis is to create a one-number text and voice voting system for Swedish telco Telia.

Supplied by Telsis seven years ago, Telia's MegaCall system already handles over 100 million premium rate voice calls a year. Now Telsis is enhancing MegaCall to support text and voice voting to the same number.

The move will increase choice for programme makers, event organisers and end-users, and grow revenues still further, says Telia mass calling product manager Stewe Wahlström. "We've already talked to some of our larger broadcast customers about SMS and they're very excited.

"At the moment, if they want to offer viewers simultaneous voice and SMS response they have to work with two different suppliers and show two different numbers on screen. That's complicated for them and complicated for the public. The enhancements to MegaCall will mean one deal, one system and a single response number for both text and voice. We're expecting combined voice and text to deliver significant growth in audience participation and revenues."

The enhancements to MegaCall will see the first deployment in Sweden of the Intelligent SMS Router. Mobile operators including Vodafone and T-Mobile are already users and the SMS Router is now being distributed globally by Ericsson.

Within MegaCall, SMS Routers receive text votes directly from the mobile networks over SS7 MAP, avoiding the SMSC bottlenecks that restrict throughput in legacy networks. The SMS Routers process the text votes and send instant replies directly to voter handsets.

Jeff Wilson, Telsis chairman comments: "There are two key benefits with our solution. Firstly, by avoiding the SMSC, Telia immediately increases throughput and therefore customer satisfaction. Secondly, an easy-to-manage system with one number for text and voice voting simplifies the whole voting experience for both producers and participants. Consequently, message volumes will be significantly increased, driving additional revenues."

www.telsis.com