EVEN as Globe Telecom and Smart Communications are engaged in legal battle over the interconnection of their SMS (short message service) or text messaging services, a Dagupan City, Pangasinan-based Internet service provider has conducted an experiment which it claims shows that the two services are technologically compatible.

"We just did one simple thing, which was to extend our existing e-mail-to-pager service. What we did was to accept e-mail from a Globe Handyphone. From there, we have the option of either redirecting it to a pager or redirecting it to the e-mail server of Smart, and from there Smart can route it to their text service. This way, we can effectively have interconnection. But what we did here was purely an academic exercise. We merely wanted to show that it can be done--to showcase what technology is capable of doing," said Wilson Chua, president of Bitstop Inc., a MosCom point of presence and EasyCall franchisee.

When the National Telecommunications Commission ordered the two cellular mobile telephone service operators to interconnect their text messaging services, Globe cited supposed software and system incompatibility as the main reason for not linking to Smart.

For the experiment that they conducted a little over a week ago, however, Chua said their programmer, Jon Cristopher Co, simply added Bitstop's existing GlobalPage (www.dagupan.com/services/globalpage.html) e-mail-to-pager service for EasyCall subscribers. Pilot tested about two years ago, this EasyCall service is currently only available to subscribers who have their units activated in Dagupan. Incidentally, Chua said Netscape browser users might find it more difficult to access the www.dagupan.com site since, as a Microsoft Certified Solution Provider, Bitstop optimized the site for Internet Explorer.

So how did they do it? After linking the Globe Handyphone to a PC with a data cable, Chua used the text-to-e-mail feature to send a message. With the slight modification, the GlobalPage program was able to accept and store the message. While normally this e-mail would be routed to a pager, Chua said the crucial step was recognizing and storing the cellular phone-transmitted service.

It should be pointed out, however, that Chua and his people did not actually complete the step of receiving the message through a Smart cellphone. He said that the point, however, is that the stored Globe message could easily be sent to Smart's own server and routed by Smart. Chua added that Bitstop conducted this experiment on its own, and that he has not talked to either Globe or Smart. As an EasyCall franchisee, Bitstop used the paging service operator's gateway for the experiment.

"I'd like to stress that this is all academic and that we did not misuse Globe's service in any way. It can't be a commercial solution. The idea here is that if it can work with EasyCall's paging service which has a different format (Pocsag is the paging service protocol), then it should be easier to interconnect Globe and Smart's services because they are both text-to-e-mail.

"Sometimes you have to ask: 'Why are you guys fighting?' Here you have text-to-email, and there you also have text-to-e-mail, so it's only a matter of setting up what you could call a relay station," Chua said.

Bitstop is still bullish over the prospects of e-mail-to-pager service, which he said effectively turns the pager into a "portable e-mail terminal."