Little did we know that our beloved text messaging, or SMS as it’s called, was developed 20 years ago. It was the brain work of a 22-year-old Neil Papworth who sent the world’s first text message from a computer to his boss’s cellphone. It read: “Merry Christmas” and has since revolutionized the way we communicate.
One year later, Nokia introduced the first mobile phone that allowed customers to send text messages to others within the same network. Then in 1999, text messages could cross networks for the time. A new fever was born.
When Neil sent the inaugural text working as a software engineer at Sema group, now Mavenir Systems, he was only trying to improve pager messaging as a lot of people did not carry cell phones in those days. 20 years down the line, SMS has the second largest revenue generating source for most telecom operators.
Some characteristics of SMS that have made it an essential mobile communications service are how inexpensive, universally available on devices and from mobile operators, and interoperable it is. Other things that made it popular was politics. In 2004, the then U.K Prime Minster, Tony Blair, took part in a live text chat and in 2008, the current US President and then Senator, Barack Obama, sent a text message to his supporters to announce his vice presidential running mate. The act of sending SMS (also called “texting”) now dominates the way young people communicate. This has also helped today’s social media giants like Facebook and Twitter.
With technology and increased affordability of mobile devices, a World Bank study estimated that about three-quarters of the world population now has access to a mobile phone. Trillions of text messages are sent around the globe every day.
However, I believe texting may soon become a thing of the past as the major driving force, which is the youth, have turned to instant messaging and possible voice messaging application on today’s smartphones. With so many OTT (Over The Top) applications like Whatsapp, Nimbuzz, BlackBerry Messanger, and Apple’s iMessage application, telecom operators would need to re-invent a new revenue generating source to replace SMS.
