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This month marks the 20th anniversary of the first SMS text message, and while the mobile industry has been commemorating this game-changing technology, it’s just as important to note the significant role text and mobile messaging continues to play today and will do well into the future.
While SMS remains the one ubiquitous text messaging service today – and research shows that many consumers still can’t live without it – the best is yet to come, with the introduction of new “rich” messaging services which has all the renowned quality and reach of SMS but with the enriched features associated with over-the-top messaging services which are inundating the market today.
On this occasion, let us both review the little-known origins of SMS and spotlight some of the services we can expect to see over the next 20 years and beyond.
In the beginning
It was 1984 when the very initial concept of mobile messaging was contemplated by a 32- year-old graduate engineer, Matti Makkonen. His revolutionary idea to create a message handling service for GSM digital mobile phones was something that the world had never seen before. This became the foundation for the text messaging service we continue to use today.
Just a year later, researcher Friedhelm Hillebrand suggested that 160 characters was “perfectly sufficient” for all communication purposes, a line of thought that soon gave birth to the very notion of a “short-messaging service.” Interestingly, decades later, this length also formed the basis for Twitter – demonstrating yet again that simple, short and punchy is key to getting a message across.
However, it was a number of years after the initial conceptual ideas of SMS began, that the first text message was sent. On Dec. 3, 1992, a young engineer, Neil Papworth, part of a team building a short message service center for use as an internal paging service, sent the world’s first ever text message. It read “Merry Christmas.” Little did he know that this simple SMS would define the very nature of text messaging, which would later became a global phenomenon and the cornerstone of mobile communication. Neil stated “at the time, it didn’t seem like a big deal.” How wrong was he.
SMS takes off
Within a year the first commercial deployment of a SMSC was installed at Telia (now TeliaSonera) in Sweden, by Aldiscon (now Acision). By the early 2000’s mobile messaging began to grow significantly. Today, U.S. mobile users send, on average, 72,000 texts per second according to trade association CTIA.
The evolution of text messaging over the past 20 years has been staggering. With a potential reach of more than 5 billion people across the globe and an impressive 98% of messages being opened and read, text has grown to become the leading personal messaging communication service in the world, used by all demographics and age groups.
Latest research figures from Informa suggest that 5.9 trillion text messages were sent last year alone, with SMS traffic expected to reach 9.4 trillion messages by 2016.
Surprisingly, SMS has remained fundamentally unchanged since its inception and the ubiquitous nature of SMS amongst other factors: reach, security, reliability, speed, ease of use and its open rate, has contributed to its success. Such attributes have helped give SMS its dominant status, yet with the current mobile messaging landscape developing at an impressive rate, remaining relevant and enriching the user experience is key to co-exist and carve a clear role in today’s mobile world.
Even with the rise of OTT and instant messaging services, industry experts believe SMS revenues will continue to increase globally, with Portio Research estimating that mobile networks will earn $726 billion from SMS over the next five years.
Into the future
While SMS is likely to remain popular as a standalone messaging service for years to come, it will also provide a backbone service to operators who are looking to enhance the mobile messaging experience and deliver a service not only for text but for instant updates, notifications, social chat, file transfer, presence and connecting social networks. As experienced service providers, with a solid customer base, reputation of trust and quality, as well as insight into user behavior, operators are in a unique position to leverage existing assets while integrating new messaging services into their offering that resonate with the user. Recent research backs this up.
Earlier this year Acision asked 1,250 smartphone users about their messaging requirements (from the United Kingdom and United States), respondents were asked about the attractiveness of a new operator-based service that provided SMS/MMS/IM/group chat and file/video sharing that reaches all mobile users across all devices and networks. Over half (52%) stated they would use such a service, with just 5% stating they would not use it at all. Even in the younger age bracket of 18-34 years, where OTT apps are most prevalent – 60% of smartphone owners stated they were highly interested in such a service from their mobile operator.
This research, combined with consumer adoption of new OTT messaging applications, demonstrates a clear appetite for services that enhance and enrich the messaging user experience. If operators can provide a messaging service with rich features and the ubiquitous nature of SMS they may just have the next killer app. The time is right for forward thinking operators and businesses to make sure that they’re part of the new messaging revolution.
Looking back, nobody can deny the incredible success SMS has enjoyed since its birth in December 1992. The medium quickly grew to become the trigger for the messaging world we know today, which must now evolve in order to remain relevant tomorrow. Text messaging not only continues to flourish, it stands as a communication platform accepted by all, with a unique simplicity. While market uptake of OTT messaging has been augmented by perception that such services are free, these rely on a data connection and without SMS to fall back on when a connection is down, they risk a perception of service degradation. If operators can successfully combine the reach, reliability and simplicity found in SMS with a rich user experience offered by new OTT applications – they can really shake up the messaging space and ensure ownership of it by embracing standards such as the GSMA’s rich communication suite initiative.
So as we celebrate the 20th anniversary of SMS, we can also look ahead to how operators and enterprises can evolve and enrich this successful communications channel. With this in mind, we may very well be marking an even greater celebration of messaging in another 20 years.
