SMS stands for Short Message Service. People with mobile phones can send and acquire text messages the use of the service. It additionally works on a few landlines.
SMS messages, or texts, travel on the cellular network. In contrast, messages despatched thru apps which include Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp use Internet protocols.
A standard SMS message may have as much as a hundred and sixty alphanumeric characters. If a text exceeds this limit, the era breaks it up into separate messages.
Popularity of SMS
Text messaging thru SMS has many uses. Examples consist of:
- Communicating with friends and colleagues.
- Voting and taking element in stay TV indicates and competitions.
- Doctors and dentists sending appointment reminders.
- News offerings sending rating updates to sports activities fans.
- Banks sending one-time passcodes to allow get entry to to Internet banking.
Compared with messaging apps, SMS is the least secure messaging technology. Apps which include Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and WeChat use encryption while SMS does now no longer. Encrypted messages can’t be study via way of means of the messaging carrier or all and sundry who intercepts them.
Yet, despite the increase of messaging apps, texting stays famous and is the maximum great messaging carrier. Apps, on this context, stands for applications.
According to the business text messaging carrier Text Magic, extra than 15 million texts are despatched each minute worldwide. They additionally estimate that 4.2 billion human beings use this shape of messaging.
Origins of SMS
Engineer Stephen Temple become withinside the group at the vanguard of the mobile revolution withinside the 1980s. He writes that decade, “the arena become awash with human beings having thoughts approximately cell messaging.”
Temple has traced the beginning of SMS to a 1984 record approximately French-German studies and improvement trials.
That record highlighted a want for a message carrier for mobile customers. It referred to as for a carrier that might now no longer most effective convey quick alphanumeric messages, however additionally have “acknowledgement capabilities.”
Formulating the concept – after which running out the technical standards – started out in 1985. The 2010 Wiley book “Short Message Service (SMS): The Creation of Personal Global Text Messaging” tells the tale of the past, present, and destiny of the carrier.
The book explains how SMS have become a part of the second-generation cellular phone machine referred to as Global System for Mobile (GSM) communications.
The GSM builders confronted numerous demanding situations in incorporating the fast messaging carrier. One of those become a way to address messages that can’t be brought due to the fact the receiver’s mobile is switched off. The answer become a “store-and-forward” approach.
Different to MMS
Multimedia messaging (MMS) isn’t similar to SMS. MMS extends the protocols of the texting carrier to permit the sending and receiving of media documents. These files consist of images, audio and video clips, and gifs. In addition, networks commonly permit their MMS messages to have extra characters than text-most effective messages.
However, the era for multimedia messaging isn’t as great as that of text-most effective messaging.
Mobile customers ought to be conscious that the value of sending MMS messages is probable to be extra high-priced than for text messaging.
