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What is the history of SMS?
Home » Handheld Electronics » SMS » What is the history of SMS?The first commercial short message was sent on 3 December 1992 by Neil Papworth of Sema Group from a personal computer to Richard Jarvis of Vodafone on the Vodafone GSM network in the United Kingdom. However, initial growth was slow, with customers in 1995 sending on average only 0.4 messages per GSM customer per month.
One factor in the slow takeup of SMS was that operators were slow to set up charging systems, especially for prepaid subscribers, and eliminate billing fraud which was possible by changing SMSC settings on individual handsets to the SMSCs of other operators. Over time, this issue was eliminated by switch-billing instead of billing at the SMSC and by new features within SMSCs to allow blocking of foreign mobile users sending messages through it. By the end of 2000, the average number of messages per user reached 35.
SMS was originally designed as part of GSM, but is now available on a wide range of networks, including 3G networks. However, not all text messaging systems use SMS, and some notable alternate implementations of the concept include J-Phone's SkyMail and NTT Docomo's Short Mail, both in Japan. E-mail messaging from phones, as popularized by NTT Docomo's i-mode and the RIM BlackBerry, also typically use standard mail protocols such as SMTP over TCP/IP.
Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_message_service
http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/sms.htm
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