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 News and analysis Message Shortage  SMTP or SMPP? The wireless world soon may get a standard protocol for those short-winded messages of 150 to 200 characters (a couple of sentences). Today, an e-mail gateway like Microsoft Exchange cannot talk to a wireless network's gateway to send an e-mail to a cell phone user, for instance. The Internet's SMTP supports short message formats, but not specifically for wireless networks, so tweaking it to work without wires may not be so efficient. Enter SMPP (Short Message Peer-to-Peer Protocol), developed and used by Logica Aldiscon, which sells million-dollar gateways to wireless providers. Brennan Hayden, manager of Logica's application provider development program, wants to submit SMPP to the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) as the answer to delivering e-mail and voicemail between wired and wireless networks. Hayden says SMPP is the SMTP of the short-message world.
But some members of the IP community would rather stick with SMTP, expanding it to work with things like cell phones and Logica's gateway, which stores and forwards messages to cell phones and wireless devices. Logica's gateway, which it supplies to the likes of AT&T Wireless, Bell Atlantic, Southwestern Bell Mobile Systems and Nextel, can send an SMTP e-mail message to a cell phone. But SMTP doesn't know the ins and outs of a mobile telephone messaging device, Hayden says, so the feature is rudimentary. Is a protocol battle brewing? IETF officials say there may be room for a special-purpose message transfer protocol for those short bursts to the wireless world. But others, including Paul Hoffman, Internet Mail Consortium chairman, note that because you can build SMTP support into cell phones today, an extension to SMTP may not be needed after all.
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With an estimated one-half of corporations in the United States now on the Web, most companies still are using their Web sites for advertising and marketing: 66 percent of the CIOs surveyed recently by RHI Consulting say that's the main function of their sites. Only about 9 percent of those surveyed say their Web sites are for customer service and tech support, and 7 percent claim the site is for research. So even though many U.S. corporations today are deploying Internet-based applications for their intranets and extranets, they are missing the boat when it comes to customer service over the Web, according to RHI's Greg Scileppi.
