Use the Melrose Labs SMPP Load Balancer cloud platform with your SMS gateway nodes and SMSCs to provide a high availability endpoint for your customers, insulate your platforms, and optimise SMS traffic loading. Our team has over 20 years in designing, building and operating highly reliable mobile messaging services, and a key part of our success has always been SMPP load balancing or layer 7 load balancing.
The SMPP Load Balancer service provides an endpoint to which your customers connect using the SMPP protocol to submit messages for delivery to mobiles, and also to receive messages from mobiles. SMPP connections over TCP, with or without TLS, can be load-balanced at the transport layer (layer 4) onto our SMPP Load Balancer nodes. Messages submitted via those customer connections are load-balanced (layer 7) across the platforms that you define.
Benefits
The use of the SMPP Load Balancer service can bring the following benefits:
- Consistently low SMPP response times.
- Reduce exposure of platforms to the Internet.
- Improved availability.
- Reduced impact from upstream platform failures.
- Enables platform maintenance without service impact.
- Improved utilisation of resources.
Usage Scenarios

Scenario #1
Customer-facing endpoint in front of your own messaging platforms
Proxy The service proxies SMPP submit_sm requests to your platforms. In this case, SMPP binds are made from the service to your platforms using the customer SMPP account credentials and only SMS traffic sent by that customer is routed to your platforms using their credentials. Delivery receipts and MO SMS are routed back to the customer as though they had directly connected to your platforms. No customer accounts need to be configured in the service. Only the host and port number for each of your platforms needs to be configured in the SMPP Load Balancer service.
Multiplex Customer SMPP accounts and connection details for your platforms are configured in the SMPP Load Balancer service and your customers connect to the service instead of your own platforms. The service connects to your platforms and messages submitted by your customers are load-balanced across your platforms, with traffic from multiple customers being multiplexed onto upstream binds. Delivery receipts are routed back from your platforms via the service to the customer connection for the SMPP account that submitted the corresponding outbound message.

Scenario #2
Customer-facing endpoint that routes messages to supplier platforms
Customer SMPP accounts and connection details from your supplier platforms are configured in the SMPP Load Balancer service and your customers connect to the service. The service connects to your suppliers and messages submitted by your customers are load-balanced across those suppliers connections, with traffic from multiple customers being multiplexed onto upstream binds. Delivery receipts are routed back from your suppliers via the service to the customer connection for the SMPP account that submitted the corresponding outbound message.
This is ideal for when you don't need to operate your own platform, and are using the SMPP Load Balancer as a simple SMS gateway.

Scenario #3
Upstream endpoint for your platform or application
Use upstream of your platform to handle message submission to your suppliers. Your platform could be a messaging application, or an application with messaging capability, but you need more control and accounting of messaging. The SMPP Load Balancer service enables you to achieve this.
Melrose Labs SMPP Load Balancer Summary | |
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Client (ESME) Control |
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Features Supported |
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Routing |
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Worldwide Nodes |
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Portal |
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Reliability and Availability |
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Pricing
The SMPP Load Balancer service is available in a number of different configurations. Please contact us for pricing if your required configuration is not listed below.
Type | Price (per month) | Limits |
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Proxy SMPP Load Balancer Low level | GBP 195.00 per instance | 200 SMS/sec 25 upstream SMPP servers Non-TLS |
Proxy SMPP Load Balancer Medium level | GBP 295.00 per instance | 1000 SMS/sec 50 upstream SMPP servers TLS supported |
Proxy SMPP Load Balancer High level | GBP 395.00 per instance | 5000 SMS/sec 100 upstream SMPP servers TLS supported |
Service snapshot
- Load balance across multiple SMS gateways and SMSCs
- Bind authorisation on load balancer (or passthru)
- Up to 10000 SMS/sec throughput
- Concatenated SMS support
- A2P SMS
- P2A SMS