A History Of SMS

SMS was an accidental success that took nearly everyone in the mobile industry by surprise.
Few people predicted that this hard of use service would take off.There was hardly any promotion for or mention os SMS by network operators until after SMS started to be a success SMS advertising went from showing business people in suits entering text messages to bright pink and yellow advertisements aimed at the youth markets that adopted SMS.


SMS was the triumph of the consumer-every generation needs a technology that it can adopt as it own to communicate with- and the text generation took up SMS. Paradoxically, it was so very difficult to use that the young people said that they were going to overcome the man machine interface and other issues and use the service anyway. The fact that the entry barriers to learning tthe service were so high an advantage because it meant that parents and teachters and other adult authority figures were unlikely, unble and unwilling to use the service.


A whole new alphabet emerged because SMS messages took time to enter and were quite abrupt as people attempted to say as much as possible with as few keystrokes.Abbreviations such a 'C U L8er' See you later' sprung up for time saving and coolness. The use of Smileys to reduce the abruptness of the medium and to help indicate the mood of the person in a way that was difficult with just text became popular.


The introduction of prepay mobile tariffs in which people could pay for airtime advance and thereby control their mobile phone expenditure was the catalyst that accelerated the take up of SMS. The Network operators were unable technically to bill prepay customers for the SMS they were because the links between the prepay platform and the billing system and the SMS centers were not in place.The Network operators responded with silence-the prepay literature did not mention SMS at all even though the prepay phones supported the service.One thing that is certain is that in these days with the internet  revolution to spread information,the young people will identify loopholes like this. And they did. Suddenly,millions more SMS messages were bring sent-with some individual mobile phone subscriptions accounting for thousands of SMS per month alone they set up automated messages generators.

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