SMS is 13 years old. It was on December 3, 1992 that Neil Papsworth sent an SMS from a PC to Richard Jarvis of Vodafone UK.
Invented by Finnish civil servant Matti Makkonen in 1982 and submitted to GSM Standard in 1984, it became a reality in 1992. The original specification allowed 140 8-byte characters; most phones use 7 byte characters and get 160 characters on the same payload; most people think of SMS as 160-character long and there is even a site www.160characters.org, a marketing site that exploits SMS heavily.
Long messages can be split into multiple messages and delivered. The users can opt for a delivery report; SMS uses “best delivery” approach and cannot guarantee delivery but it works in most cases.
There are Premium SMS services ringtones being the prime example; here the revenue from the customer is shared between service provider and content provider; Finland customers have been using premium SMS to “call” the vending machine, get a coke bottle dispensed by the vending machine and charge the cost of the drink to their monthly phone bills.
Free SMS has been the primary reason for the phenomenal success of mobile phones in Chennai. With very low rates (about Rs 0.40 or $ 0.01) SMS is very popular in countries like India; most Asian countries use public transport and their hands are free to SMS (unlike USA and West Europe where people are “on the wheels”). Television shows like American Idol in USA or KBC in India generate a huge demand for SMS and in fact load the networks to their full capacity!
Starting at 17 Billion in 2000, SMS traffic is shot up to 500 Billion in 2004. By December 31, 2005 we are likely to cross 1 Trillion SMS messages. There were 8,5 Million SMS messages sent on Airtel network on Dipawali day (November 1, 2005) alone!
The younger generation has come up with SMS lingo (“hvru” for “How are you”); there are even concerns expressed at this “new” form of expression. There are techniques like predictive text – T9 from AOL, for example, that permit people like me to send fully composed English and yet typing the minimal keys on the mobile phone, but many people still do not use them. T9 claims that those users who use T9 are able to send 10 times more messages than those who do not use T9!
SMS in available for Indian languages also, though the usage is not that high. There have been reported cases of student indiscipline in University of Maryland in USA and Hitotsubashi University in Japan triggered by use of SMS to send solution to examinations!
Interestingly 93-year old Australian telegraph operator Gordon Hill defeated 13-year Brittney Devlin in a contest in May 2005; Hill used Morse text to send “Hey girlfriend, you can text all your best pals to tell them where you are going and what you are wearing” in 90 seconds, while Devlin took 108 seconds even after using SMS lingo! Discipline can rule over technology!
