Airwide Solutions, which provides next-generation mobile messaging and mobile Internet infrastructure, applications and solutions, has announced version 5.0 of its award-winning AirGate product range. AirGate is an advanced application and traffic management platform for rapid delivery of third-party applications and value-added services across multiple delivery channels, including SMS, MMS, WAP and the web. Airwide says the latest version reduces the time to launch innovative services from days to minutes, and enables operators to define new business models and easily adapt to changing technology.
AirGate 5.0 helps carriers tap into new revenue opportunities by incorporating network and subscriber intelligence, such as content preferences, presence and location, with mobile applications and content, to create highly contextual and relevant services.  Airwide notes that AirGate, which recently received the Gold Award for Innovation at the Mobile Advertising and Marketing Awards (MAMAs), is the industrys only gateway that provides the flexible business logic necessary to easily integrate with a variety of network resources, ranging from billing and ad insertion systems, to location servers and device capability databases, and to expose those capabilities to applications, yielding exponentially more powerful, appealing and sticky revenue-generating services.
AirGate offers wizard-based provisioning and service provider profiles that allow carriers to define new services and their network access rights in seconds instead of the days required with other products. 
In addition, AirGate provides a high level of control over services and application traffic in order to protect quality of service and maximise the efficiency of carrier infrastructure, ultimately reducing costs. With AirGate 5.0, service and provider-level policies govern the full range of message attributes, peak and long-term throughput, the number of allowable connections, and the network information made available to service providers. Additionally, fine-grained routing based on numerous parameters such as keywords, short code and MSISDN (Mobile Station International ISDN Number), along with real-time SLA (Service Level Agreement) enforcement, guarantee service quality, protect person-to-person (P2P) traffic, and optimize infrastructure use.
Messaging gateways are becoming a critical element within next generation mobile networks to enable operators to access content, traffic and subscribers from other networks and to enable mobile advertising and other revenue-generating services, says Airwide Chief Marketing Officer, Jay Seaton. But with access to external traffic comes increased complexity and the need for control to protect operators networks and subscribers. While most next generation gateways enable connections to other networks, AirGate is unique in providing a comprehensive set of capabilities to rapidly add new revenue-generating applications, and maximize the return on these applications by incorporating contextual information that makes them more useful and valuable to the subscriber.