Aardvark Daily

Please visit the sponsor!

Happy Birthday SMS

According to an article I read today, the SMS or short messaging service" we're all so familiar with on our mobile phones, is 20 years old this month.

The birth of the SMS coincided with the commercial launch of GSM-based mobile phones way back in 1992 and since that date, the popularity of the service has grown in leaps and bounds. Now it is ubiquitous and being used by in excess of 4 billion people world-wide.

Who'd have thought that something so limited and, until recently, relatively expensive (at least in NZ) would become so popular?

Users love SMS for many reasons. It is (now) relatively cheap, especially since the introduction of flat-rate plans; it is convenient; it is asynchronous - so you don't have to rely on the recipient having their phone turned on or being able to pick it up in real-time; and it is relatively silent -- allowing covert conversations to be held even while in meetings or at the movies.

The mobile phone companies love SMS because it's a fantastic way to utilize (for profit) otherwise unused bandwidth.

Because SMS isn't guaranteed to be realtime, telcos can load up their networks to near 100% capacity without worrying about too many customer grizzles. If an SMS takes 10 minutes to reach its recipient it's no big deal but if a call can't be placed because the network is overloaded, people soon get pee'd off.

By prioritising SMS as "idle-time" traffic, the telcos are able to just keep filling up the gaps in their network data-flow and rake in a small fortune while doing it.

Let's face it, if you're not on a flat-rate SMS plan then the charges for these tiny chunks of data are outrageous.

I can send an email with a 500mB attachment to the UK using my internet connection, effectively for free (providing I'm not over my cap). Sending a 160 byte SMS however, will probably cost me about $0.40 (from memory). If my that email was charged the same rate it would cost over $1,200 to send.

WTF?

Although there clearly has to be a premium associated with the convenience of a "from anywhere - to anywhere" RF-based service, surely this massive disparity beggars belief?

I do like SMS however, if just for one reason. It reminds me that I'm often wrong about the viability of various technologies. When I first saw SMS I thought "that will never take off -- nobody's going to enter text through a phone keypad in such a clumsy way".

Yes, I was dead-wrong!

It's amazing how quickly the brain and body can learn new skills and manage to mitigate the effects of a really lousy interface. Even I can now spit out an SMS in just a few seconds, complete with proper capitalisation, apostrophes and other punctuation (yes, I'm that old-fashioned).

One thing I can't get to grips with however, is that auto-complete dictionary-based interface that most phones now offer. Granted that it's probably because I simply can't be bothered adapting (a Borg I'm not) -- but I find that my cheap phones never suggest the appropriate word and, when I've tried such "features" I spend more time correcting than actually composing.

Despite my prowess with thumb and keypad, I'm not a big txter. Although I might receive a few hundred txts a month, I only send a handful -- which makes them an expensive communications mechanism on a per-message basis. The flat-rate monthly-fee plans are a waste of money, given that I send so few messages which means I end up paying $0.20 per txt. That's a crazy price I know but, even at this rate, my $20 top-up lasts me over 2 months.

So what will replace the humble SMS?

Or will we still be devising more cryptic txt-speak in another couple of decades' time?

Please visit the sponsor!

Have your say on this...

PERMALINK to this column

Oh, and don't forget today's sci/tech news headlines

Rank This Aardvark Page

Change Font