Aldiscon Limited was a

telecommunications Telecommunication, often used in its plural form or abbreviated as telecom, is the transmission of information over a distance using electronic means, typically through cables, radio waves, or other communication technologies. These means of ...

software company founded in

Dublin, Ireland Dublin is the capital and largest city of Republic of Ireland, Ireland. Situated on Dublin Bay at the mouth of the River Liffey, it is in the Provinces of Ireland, province of Leinster, and is bordered on the south by the Dublin Mountains, pa ...

, in 1988. The company supplied software products to mobile phone operators and became a leader in the supply of

short message service centre Short may refer to: Places * Short (crater), a lunar impact crater on the near side of the Moon * Short, Mississippi, an unincorporated community * Short, Oklahoma, a census-designated place People * Short (surname) * List of people known ...

s (SMSC).

History

Aldiscon was founded in 1988 by Gilbert Little. Aldiscon launched the world's first commercial Short Messaging Services in 1993 using its Telepath SMSC platform in the UK, Hong Kong and USA. By the time of its sale to

Logica Plc Logica plc was a multinational IT and management consultancy company headquartered in London and later Reading, United Kingdom. Founded in 1969, the company had offices in London and in a number of major cities across England, Wales and Scotl ...

in 1997, the company supplied over 70 mobile carriers worldwide in technologies including

GSM The Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) is a family of standards to describe the protocols for second-generation (2G) digital cellular networks, as used by mobile devices such as mobile phones and Mobile broadband modem, mobile broadba ...

, DCS 1800,

UMTS The Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) is a 3G mobile cellular system for networks based on the GSM standard. UMTS uses Wideband Code Division Multiple Access, wideband code-division multiple access (W-CDMA) radio access technolog ...

IS-95 cdmaOne, most often simply referred to as CDMA, is a 2G digital cellular technology. It was the commercial name for Interim Standard 95 (IS-95), a technology that was developed by Qualcomm and later adopted as a standard by the Telecommunica ...

(CDMA),

CDMA2000 CDMA2000 (also known as C2K or IMT Multi‑Carrier (IMT‑MC)) is a family of 3G mobile technology standards for sending voice, data, and signaling data between mobile phones and cell sites. It is developed by 3GPP2 as a backwards-compatib ...

, ANSI-136 (TDMA), Japanese PDC and

Motorola Motorola, Inc. () was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois. It was founded by brothers Paul and Joseph Galvin in 1928 and had been named Motorola since 1947. Many of Motorola's products had been ...

iDEN Integrated Digital Enhanced Network (iDEN) is a mobile telecommunications technology, developed by Motorola, which provides its users the benefits of a Trunked radio system, trunked radio and a mobile phone, cellular telephone. It was called ...

. Aldiscon developed the

Short Message Peer-to-Peer Short Message Peer-to-Peer (SMPP) in the telecommunications industry is an open, industry standard protocol designed to provide a flexible data communication interface for the transfer of short message data between External Short Messaging Enti ...

(SMPP)

industry protocol for exchanging SMS messages between SMS peer entities such as short message service centres, voice mail systems and distributed telemetry elements. By the late 1990s, the company put the protocol into a non-profit entity called the SMS Forum whose members included both messaging system suppliers and carriers. Aldiscon founders helped establish several mobile software companies based in the Republic of Ireland and in Northern Ireland, UK. Some include Aldiscon, Apion, Aepona, Ammeon, Accuris Networks and Altion. Aldiscon originally consisted of three subsidiaries: Aldiscon Telecommunications Software Systems, Ltd. based in Dublin, Ireland; Aldiscon, Inc. based in Dublin, Ohio USA; and Aldiscon Northern Ireland Ltd. based in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Acquisition by Logica

Aldiscon was acquired by

of London, UK in 1997 for GBP 56.9 million. Logica Plc was a large systems integration firm and it renamed Aldiscon as Logica Mobile Networks. By 2002, Logica Mobile Networks generated USD 400M of Logica's revenue. At the time of the sale, Aldiscon Northern Ireland was spun out into a separate company, Apion Ltd, and retained by the original owners. Logica Mobile Networks was divested from Logica in 2007, with the new company named Acision and Aldiscon founder Larry Quinn returning to chair it. In October 1999, Phone.com acquired APiON's

Wireless Application Protocol Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is an obsolete technical standard for accessing information over a mobile cellular network. Introduced in 1999, WAP allowed users with compatible mobile devices to browse content such as news, weather and sp ...

(WAP) product division. APiON shareholders received 1.3 million shares in Phone.com valued at approximately £150 million (US$239 million). A new spin off company, AePONA, was created at same time and retained by the original owners.

References

Telecommunications companies of Ireland Irish companies established in 1988 {{telecom-company-stub