An Alternative View to Texting
SMS (Short Message Service) messaging - a means of transmitting and exchanging short messages by mobile phone - may only date back less than twenty years, but it had its beginnings in the mid-1980s. GSM (Global System for Mobile Communication), a CEPT group, put forth a plan requesting the services and facilities that had been made available by the public switched networks and public data networks… should also be made available by mobile phone. This plan was approved in December 1982. In 1984, the technicians Friedhelm Hillebrand of Germany and Bernard Ghillebaert of France developed the concept of SMS. The goal was to used telephony resources that had been hitherto unused, at a minimal cost. At that time, there was no signalling traffic.
In February 1985, the first proposal initiating the development of SMS was given at a GSM meeting in Oslo. SMS's three services were decided on; they were to be: (1) SM Mobile Terminated / Point-to-Point; (2) SM Mobile Originated / Point-to-Point: and (3) Short message Cell Broadcast. The first two refer to a network's ability to transmit a short message to and from a mobile phone respectively. Two years later, the Implementation of Data and Telematic Services Experts Group - later to be known as WP4 - set up the technical standard on which SMS has operated ever since. (The cell phone was also invented that year.) In addition, IDEG brought into existence a Drafting Group Message Handling, which established both the design and the specification of SMS.
Text messaging began in 1992. On December 3 of that year, Sema Group's Neil Papworth sent the first SMS message to Richard Jarvis of Vodaphone. He sent the message over the Vodaphone GSM network on an Orbital 901 handset. The message was "Merry Christmas!"
During the first years of its existence, SMS service was relatively rarely made use of; on the average, only 0.4 messages were sent for every GSM customer each month. By 2001, this figure had increased to 35, and by 2006 it had skyrocketed to upwards of 205 million in Great Britain. The change from billing at the SMSC to switch billing was the factor largely responsible for this increase in use: previously, operators had been slow to set up a billing system, particularly for prepaid subscribers. Until 1999, mobile phone networks did not allow users to send short messages to people subscribed to competing companies. Mr Bud says the decision to allow messages to be sent between networks made SMS "100 times more useful". SMS also became available outside of GSM, on 3G networks.
Today, SMS has become a multi-billion dollar industry with sms marketing. It remains, however, more popular in Europe and Australia than in the United States and Canada.