Article Legacy

We all use our mobiles daily to send sms messages to and receive text messages from family, friends and work related contacts. It has become a daily feature of our lives with on average 36 messages being sent per month for every mobile phone on the market.

But how did SMS, especially free SMS become such a large part of our daily lives and where did it originate from?

No company or individual can claim the right that they developed the Short Message Service. It was the co-operation of many different people around the world that led to this achievement.

In 1985 the first proposal of SMS was made to the GSM meeting by France and Germany. The development of the modern SMS service on the GSM network was prompted by this meeting. The first SMS or text message was sent by the Vodafone GSM network on the 3 December 1992 in the United Kingdom using a computer. The first SMS or text message sent by a mobile phone, is claimed by an engineer working for Nokia in 1993.

In 1995 the SMS service first became available, it initially showed some slow growth when only 0.5 messages per month were sent per handset. This figure in 2000 had risen to 35 text messages per GSM handset per month. That’s a whopping 70 fold increase in 5 years.

Text messaging is very widely used within the USA, sending over 70 Billion messages via SMS in 2008. There are many reasons for this SMS service becoming so popular.

Rather than calling a person one can save money by sending a quick SMS instead. It has also become a very popular communication channel for the youth of the world. Commercial sending of bulk SMS messages using a PC that connects to a SMS gateway has become a very popular and effective marketing tool.

The short message services’ massive growth is rather simple. SMS messaging provides a cheap and easy to use two way communication channel compared to making a phone call. SMS enables one to receive a message any time any place unlike sending a email where you need to be in front of a PC. Telecommunication costs can be reduced by almost 80% when using SMS or text messaging.

Big corporations dramatically increase their customer service ratings by using SMS for notifications. We have become so used to the easy way of communication that SMS provides us that it will be part of our lives for some time to come.

The SMS industry has shown no signs of slowing down and is worth over 81 billion US dollars a year. With nearly a 90% profit margin it is no wonder that the SMS industry is booming.