New SMS capacity and load balancing

It might sound like mundane stuff, but aql have been in the SMS API business since the year 2000. Our API’s are embedded in hundreds of software applications serving over 30,000 Customers including 35 of the FTSE 100. So – the upgrades that we’ve done are a bit like trying to rebuild the engine of a moving car and everything we’ve done and are doing needs to be seamless and without impact.

As you may know – we’ve invested millions in datacentres and infrastructure to increase the resilience of our services. We’ve completely rewritten our API platforms and this, coupled with some really good (expensive) encryption acceleration and load balancing – we have achieved over a TENFOLD increase in throughput. This is across both SMPP and HTTPS APIs. (SMPP is our ultra-fast carrier-grade SMS interface, supporting thousands of messages a second).

The reason this throughput is important is because aql handle most of the weather-impact SMS traffic in the UK.

For example :

If a school contacts a parent, it probably goes via us.
If your bus or train service reschedules and they text you – it’s probably via us.
If engineers need to be deployed to manage national infrastructure, the field force automation SMS is likely to be through us.
All the folks that work from home and receive 2 factor SMS – again – likely to run via us.

So, it’s paramount that our systems are not only built to handle the mundane but also the extreme.

We’ve still got more work to do – which involves further modifications to our multi-site load balancing – but this will be seamless works which are to be on-going over the next 6 months or so. If you’re a customer and would like to have a site tour so you can see for yourself the amount of investment that is underpinning your service – please let us know and it’d be our pleasure to show you round.