The rise and rise of SMS

Article Summary

January 26, 2007 Mobile communications means many things to different people, though when the first commercial SMS message was sent on December 3, 1992, its future was not seen as significant in comparison to the potential for voice and multimedia communications – simple text messaging looked like a budget-priced stopgap until mobile bandwidth grew and dropped in price. How wrong we were ! In the late nineties, the technology achieved mainstream status among younger audiences as a medium for audience voting for that other modern day phenomenon, reality television, but its convenient asynchronous nature has seen its star continue to rise and it is now among the most widely used communication mediums of all. Since the turn of the century, text messaging has been experiencing phenomenal growth and figures released this week showing that the number of SMS sent globally for the traditional peak period of New Year increased to a remarkable 33 billion messages on New Year’s Day – that’s 30 percent up on last year.

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