SMS HISTORY

SMS HISTORY

The effervescent SMS was one of those accidents of science that was waiting to happen. It took the world by surprise. Actually few people predicted that the basic SMS service would take off. Indeed there was minimal promotion of SMS by network operators and whatever little was prevalent increased only after SMS started to be a success. SMS advertising became focused on the youth markets that adopted SMS with enthusiasm and made it a roaring success.

Today a mobile phone is the ultimate must have object in his horizon, he will not settle for anything else. And thus began the rise of the text messaging generation, it adopted the odd typing style heartily and went on to make SMS providers rich.

SMS was a triumph in as much as every generation needs a technology it can adopt freely, and the next generation took up SMS with enthusiasm. Paradoxically, it was because SMS was so very difficult to use that the young people said that they would use the service anyway. SMS is one of the few services in consumer history that has grown inversely without the corresponding decreases in pricing. Usually, even in the case of voice mobile phones, price reductions in the cost of the phones and phone service have led to increases in usage. Whilst the lower rates helped to bring younger people into the mobile market, the SMS prices stayed steady.

A whole new language has emerged out of the obsession of the young SMS messengers. Abbreviations such as 'C U L8er' were timesaving and coolness.

The advent of prepaid tariffs, which enabled people to pay airtime in advance and thus control their mobile phone expenditure, accelerated the SMS. Suddenly, many millions of SMS messages were being sent. In fact some individual mobile phone subscriptions sent thousands of SMS per month alone as they set up automated message generators. Meanwhile SMS continued to spread and people were using it because it cost nothing compared to voice. The volume of SMS messages continued its upward growth ever since, propelled by simple person to person messaging as people told each other how they were feeling and what they were doing. SMS has become an important part of the way that young people communicated with each other in their daily life. SMS would have taken off without this prepay factor because it was already being used before that time.

Another great success for SMS services was ringtones. Nokia’s smart messaging protocol was built on binary SMS. Nokia had expected this technology to be used for information services and over the air service profiling. Since the year 2000, it offered ringtones that allowed users to change the way their mobile phone rang. Service providers are using premium rate Interactive Voice Response (IVR) voice platforms to trigger the transmission of ringtones. The ringtones market is now a billion dollar market and is dominated by independent providers who advertise in newspapers and magazines.

SMS was the consumer triumph-- a truly grassroots revolution. It would do well for service providers to realize that success involves the setting up of the right environment to allow services to succeed- ensuring that all players implement the same open standards in the same way, putting the right payment and micro billing technologies in place and by recognizing that patience pays in building a critical mass of usage.

"Mobile" or "Cell"
What is correct? "mobile" phone or "cell" phone? Same thing. The word cell is short for cellular and has been used since Bell Laboratories set up the first wireless telephony system in 1947. It consisted of a network of low-powered transmitters, each placed to cover a small region or cell. Commercial cell phones were introduced in Chicago in 1978 and in Europe in 1981. If you're surprised to learn that mobile telephony has been around so long, here's another surprise: Bell Laboratories invented the videophone in 1927.

Numbers
Most numbers on a phone keypad have letters assigned to them. For instance, the letters for the number 2 are a, b and c. But there are no letters assigned to the numbers 1 and 0. These numbers remain unassigned because they are so-called flag numbers, kept for special purposes such as emergency or operator services. Previously, Q and Z were not included on the keypad, meaning that you could not dial a word such as Quincy. Q is now assigned to the number 7, and Z to number 9.