SMS Turns 20 Years Old: Top 5 Fascinating Facts Collected About the Short Text Messaging Service

Today is the day when the world took the first next step in the category of communication with the introduction of Short Message Service (SMS).

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 (now Mavenir Systems) using a personal computer to Richard Jarvis of Vodafone using an Orbitel 901 handset. The text of the message was "Merry Christmas."

Hence, here Gizbot bring you Top 5 facts about the text messaging service to let you know more about your favourite and essential mobile facility. Let’s take a look!

Fact 1: SMS was invented by Matti Makkonen, who is a Finnish engineer and an inventor in the field of mobile communications. He has been employed (among others) by Nokia Networks and Tele Finland, as well as Finnet Oy:n. Makkonen played a leading role in creating the mobile communication unit of what is today TeliaSonera.

Fact 2: 20 years old SMS technology used on mobile phones originated from radio telegraphy in radio memo pagers using standardized phone protocols and later defined as part of the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) series of standards in 1985 can send only up to 160 characters to and from GSM mobile handsets.

Fact 3: According to recent estimates and data analysis, there are around 6 billion cellphone subscribers today and almost all of them have access to SMS. The introduction of prepaid cellular service and innovations like T9 predictive text input helped the market grow and in 2000 the industry counted 17 billion text messages, according to data from Ericsson. That number grew by around 20 times over just the next two years.

Fact 4: Today, upwards of 7 trillion text messages are sent every year—that's more than 200,000 per second—but the technology had humble beginnings.

Fact 5: In China, SMS is very popular and has brought service providers significant profit (18 billion short messages were sent in 2001. It is a very influential and powerful tool in the Philippines, where the average user sends 10–12 text messages a day.

The Philippines alone sends on the average 400 million text messages a day, or approximately 142 billion text messages sent a year, more than the annual average SMS volume of the countries in Europe, and even China and India. SMS is hugely popular in India, where youngsters often exchange lots of text messages, and companies provide alerts, infotainment, news, cricket scores updates, railway/airline booking, mobile billing, and banking services on SMS.

Source: Wikipedia