SMS – An Impressive Introduction

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Pervasive and widespread use of instant messaging, Internet chat rooms and text messaging has led to surprise success of a new lingo called Short Message Service (SMS) - an economical and time-efficient service to send and receive short text messages to and from mobile telephones.

SMS disbursal is based on store and forward mechanism, wherein the message is saved at a Short Message Service Center (SMSC) to be sent to the recipient upon accessibility. The delivery process is supposed to be the “best effort”, which implies that delay or complete loss of a message is not uncommon, particularly when communication involves different networks. Users may opt for delivery reports to avail positive confirmation of delivery of the message to intended recipient.

Tracing back the history of SMS, it all started in the beginning of 1980s when the experts from many communities of mobile communication services brainstormed possible GSM services. Amongst SMS was outlined as a means to alert the individual mobile user. The usage of SMS as a means of sending text messages between mobile phones was a rare thought. The first commercial SMS was sent on 3rd December 1992 from the PC of Neil Papworth of Sema Group to mobile phone of Richard Jarvis on the Vodafone GSM network in UK.

After an initial slow take off, the SMS market in the European Union reached one billion short messages per month in April 1999. There has been no looking back since, as the market size of SMS worldwide is experiencing unprecedented and unexpected growth.

The most rampant use of SMS is witnessed in South East Asia, particularly Singapore and Philippines. In Philippines alone, around 350 to 400 million messages are sent daily, which is more than the combined volumes of European countries, America and China. SMS is a part of all regional marketing campaigns, advocacy and entertainment reflecting upon the powerful, economical and popular nature of SMS there. Europe closely follows Asia in terms of the popularity of the use of SMS. Except France, the entire Europe Union widely uses SMS, with the figures touching an average of 16 billion in 2003. US observes a rather limited appeal for SMS with a figure of only 13 messages per average user in 2003. Finland and Japan too share favorism for SMS, but in different forms. Like in Finland “SMS chat” is more popular and Japan uses “mobile email” for text messaging as a norm.

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