SMS
Short Message Service is a text messaging service component of most telephone, Internet and mobile device systems. It uses standardized communication protocols that let mobile phones exchange short text messages, typically transmitted over cellular networks.
Developed as part of the GSM standards, and based on the SS7 signalling protocol, SMS rolled out on digital cellular networks starting in 1993 and was originally intended for customers to receive alerts from their carrier/operator. The service allows users to send and receive text messages of up to 160 characters, originally to and from GSM phones and later also CDMA and Digital AMPS; it has since been defined and supported on newer networks, including present-day 5G ones. Using SMS gateways, messages can be transmitted over the Internet through an SMSC, allowing communication to computers, fixed landlines, and satellite. MMS was later introduced as an upgrade to SMS with "picture messaging" capabilities.
In addition to recreational texting between people, SMS is also used for mobile marketing, two-factor authentication logging-in, televoting, mobile banking, and for other commercial content. The SMS standard has been hugely popular worldwide as a method of text communication: by the end of 2010, it was the most widely used data application with an estimated 3.5 billion active users, or about 80% of all mobile phone subscribers. More recently, SMS has become increasingly challenged by newer proprietary instant messaging services; RCS has been designated as the potential open standard successor to SMS.
Developmental history
SMS technology originated from radio telegraphy in radio memo pagers that used standardized phone protocols. These were defined in 1986 as part of the Global System for Mobile Communications series of standards.GSM Doc 28/85 "Services and Facilities to be provided in the GSM System" rev2, June 1985 The first SMS message was sent on 3 December 1992, when Neil Papworth, a test engineer for Sema Group, sent "Merry Christmas" to the Orbitel 901 phone of colleague Richard Jarvis.Initial concept
Adding text messaging functionality to mobile devices began in the early 1980s. The first action plan of the CEPT Group GSM was approved in December 1982, requesting that "The services and facilities offered in the public switched telephone networks and public data networks ... should be available in the mobile system." This plan included the exchange of text messages either directly between mobile stations, or transmitted via message handling systems in use at that time.The SMS concept was developed in the Franco-German GSM cooperation in 1984 by Friedhelm Hillebrand and Bernard Ghillebaert. The GSM is optimized for telephony, since this was identified as its main application. The key idea for SMS was to use this telephone-optimized system, and to transport messages on the signalling paths needed to control the telephone traffic during periods when no signalling traffic existed. In this way, unused resources in the system could be used to transport messages at minimal cost. However, it was necessary to limit the length of the messages to 128 bytes so that the messages could fit into the existing signalling formats. Based on his personal observations and on analysis of the typical lengths of postcard and Telex messages, Hillebrand argued that 160 characters was sufficient for most brief communications.
SMS could be implemented in every mobile station by updating its software. Hence, a large base of SMS-capable terminals and networks existed when people began to use SMS. A new network element required was a specialized short message service centre, and enhancements were required to the radio capacity and network transport infrastructure to accommodate growing SMS traffic.
Early development
The technical development of SMS was a multinational collaboration supporting the framework of standards bodies. Through these organizations the technology was made freely available to the whole world.The first proposal which initiated the development of SMS was made by a contribution of Germany and France in the GSM group meeting in February 1985 in Oslo. This proposal was further elaborated in GSM subgroup WP1 Services based on a contribution from Germany. There were also initial discussions in the subgroup WP3 network aspects chaired by Jan Audestad. The result was approved by the main GSM group in a June 1985 document which was distributed to industry. The input documents on SMS had been prepared by Friedhelm Hillebrand of Deutsche Telekom, with contributions from Bernard Ghillebaert of France Télécom. The definition that Friedhelm Hillebrand and Bernard Ghillebaert brought into GSM called for the provision of a message transmission service of alphanumeric messages to mobile users "with acknowledgement capabilities". The last three words transformed SMS into something much more useful than the electronic paging services used at the time that some in GSM might have had in mind.
SMS was considered in the main GSM group as a possible service for the new digital cellular system. In GSM document "Services and Facilities to be provided in the GSM System," both mobile-originated and mobile-terminated short messages appear on the table of GSM teleservices.
The discussions on the GSM services were concluded in the recommendation GSM 02.03 "TeleServices supported by a GSM PLMN." Here a rudimentary description of the three services was given:
- Short message mobile-terminated / Point-to-Point: the ability of a network to transmit a Short Message to a mobile phone. The message can be sent by phone or by a software application.
- Short message mobile-originated / Point-to-Point: the ability of a network to transmit a Short Message sent by a mobile phone. The message can be sent to a phone or to a software application.
- Short message cell broadcast.
Early implementations
The first SMS message was sent over the Vodafone GSM network in the United Kingdom on 3 December 1992, from Neil Papworth of Sema Group using a personal computer to Richard Jarvis of Vodafone using an Orbitel 901 handset. The text of the message was "Merry Christmas."The first commercial deployment of a short message service center was by Aldiscon part of Logica with Telia in Sweden in 1993, followed by Fleet Call in the US, Telenor in Norway and BT Cellnet.
The first commercially sold SMS service was offered to consumers, as a person-to-person text messaging service by Radiolinja in Finland in 1993. Most early GSM mobile phone handsets did not support the ability to send SMS text messages, and Nokia was the only handset manufacturer whose total GSM phone line in 1993 supported user-sending of SMS text messages. According to Matti Makkonen, an engineer at Nokia at the time, the Nokia 2010, which was released in January 1994, was the first mobile phone to support composing SMSes easily.
Growth and adoption
Initial growth was slow, with customers in 1995 sending on average only 0.4 messages per GSM customer per month. Initially, networks in the UK only allowed customers to send messages to other users on the same network, limiting the usefulness of the service. This restriction was lifted in 1999. Over time, this issue was eliminated by switch billing instead of billing at the SMSC and by new features within SMSCs to allow blocking of foreign mobile users sending messages through it. By the end of 2000, the average number of messages reached 35 per user per month, and on Christmas Day 2006, over 205 million messages were sent in the UK alone. SMS had become a social phenomenon in Finland among teens and youngsters by 1999. SMS traffic across Europe reached 4 billion messages as of January 2000.SMS became extremely popular in the Philippines by 2001 and the country was dubbed the "texting capital of the world", partly helped by large numbers of free text messages offered by the mobile operators in monthly subscriptions. SMS adoption was limited to parts of Europe and Asia during these earlier years, with U.S. adoption being low partly due to incompatible networks and cheap voice calls relative to other countries. The Economist wrote in 2003, as noted by an analyst:
This is also backed by the fact that as of 2003, American internet users were spending on average five times more time online than Europeans, and many poorer countries in Europe and other regions around the world had significantly lower rates of internet access compared to the United States at the time, hence making SMS more accessible.
Contemporary usage
SMS has become a large commercial industry, earning $114.6 billion globally in 2010. In the year 2002, 366 billion SMS text messages were sent globally, a number that rose to 6.1 trillion in 2010. In 2015, the actual cost of sending an SMS in Australia was found to be $0.00016 per SMS. The global SMS messaging business was estimated to be worth over US$240 billion in 2013, accounting for almost half of all revenue generated by mobile messaging.The popularity of SMS also led to the spontaneous creation of the so-called 'SMS language' phenomenon, where words are shortened in order to deal with the 160 character limit of SMS messages. Usage of SMS for mobile data services became increasingly prominent in the early 2000s due to its ubiquity, reliability, and cold reception of the newer WAP standard.. In the early and mid 2000s, Multimedia Messaging Service was developed as an improved version of SMS that supports sending of pictures and video.
SMS has been increasingly challenged by Internet Protocol-based messaging services with additional features for modern mobile devices, such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, or WeChat. These services run independently from mobile network operators and typically don't provide cross-platform messaging capabilities like SMS or email does. For example, between 2010 and 2022, SMS telecom revenue in India dropped 94 percent, while "revenue share per user from data usage...grew over 10 times.", although in some regions such as North America SMS continues to be used by over 80 percent of the population as of 2023. In order to create a modern successor to SMS that isn't run by a single company and is fully interoperable between devices, industry figures have created the RCS 'Universal Profile' initiative. It was supported by Apple when iOS 18 came out in 2024, which will mean that virtually all new mobile phones will have RCS texting capabilities, though this may also depend on if the network operator supports it.