Posted: July 27, 2007

This was a great week for text-messaging, as two important SMS milestones were announced and an important text-based initiative was launched.
The mobile phone industry is celebrating the 15th birthday of the Short Message Service Centre (SMSC), the principal application behind text messaging first brought to market  in 1992. The first ever SMSC was introduced as a product designed primarily to deal with the demands and improve reliability of a developing mobile industry.

In 1992, SMSC version 1.0 had a capacity of 10 messages per second which was soon quickly surpassed through ongoing innovation to improve capacity, reliability and accessibility. By 1999 the mobile industry saw the introduction of the first high performance SMSC, with what was then an incredible 50 fold capacity increase to 500 messages per second. Such capacity speeds have now been greatly exceeded by today’s further 32 fold capacity increase.

Despite the rapid evolution of the mobile market, SMS is still the most important value-added service for operators. For operators looking to provide subscribers with robust messaging services, today’s mix and match platform means they can specify SMS capacity to meet their requirements. It is this scalability that makes the SMSC cost effective and adaptable to both growing and mature markets. Even in the most developed markets, such as Western Europe where SMS service penetration has reached 90%, SMSCs are vital to operators seeking to differentiate themselves through high-quality enhanced messaging services.

Steven van Zanen, VP Marketing for Intuitive Messaging at Acision commented: “Mobile messaging contributes significantly to the total mobile service revenues of almost every network operator on the planet, and the phenomenal evolution of the SMSC over the past 15 years has been a direct factor to the overall success of SMS.”

Also this week, Verizon Wireless announced that their subscribers sent and received 10 billion text-messages in the month of June, an all-time record for a single carrier in a single month. Verizon Wireless customers also sent and received more than 200 million multimedia messages. Both monthly figures represent an increase of more than 100% since September 2006, when the company broke the 5 billion monthly text message threshold for the first time.

The robust performance and usage of SMS has not gone unnoticed, and have led to new and innovative uses of the technology. During the first-ever You Tube debates on Monday night, presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich encouraged Americans to use text messaging to voice their opposition to the war in Iraq. Wireless subscribers were encouraged to enter the word “peace” as a text message and then send it to the number 73223, or p-e-a-c-e.

According to Michael Carmichael, Kucinich campaign strategist, the campaign team received more than 10,000 responses within the first 12 hours and days later are receiving an average of 225 text messages an hour. He said the viral nature is building thanks to the planned “peace chain” response mechanism the campaign has implemented. It is texting back to each supporter asking him or her to forward the call for peace to five more people.

“It is a new day in communications, and it is a new day in creating a new conversation with America,” said Colin Rogero, representative of the media agency assisting the campaign.

Asked if he thinks other candidates will pick up the texting concept, Rogero said, “Absolutely.” He pointed to how Howard Dean in the last campaign harnessed the power of the Internet and other candidates subsequently followed suit. He expects Kucinich’s opponents to jump on the texting bandwagon very soon.

As SMS celebrates its suprisingly long past and immensely positive present, its continued level of innovation and voracious adoption by consumers, companies and even political candidates points to an even brighter future.

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