SMS History 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 of 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 its own to communicate with - and the text generation took up SMS. Paradoxically, it was because SMS 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 the service were so high were an advantage because it meant that parents and teachers and other adult authority figures were unlikely, unable and unwilling to use the service. A whole new alphabet emerged because SMS messages took a long time to enter and were quite abrupt as people attempted to say as much as possible with as few keystrokes. Abbreviations such as 'C U L8er' for 'See you later' sprung up for timesaving 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 their airtime in 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 using 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 being sent- with some individual mobile phone subscriptions accounting for thousands of SMS per month alone as they set up automated message generators. Network operators worked with their platform suppliers to try and sort this out and implement charging for SMS for prepay customers. Meanwhile SMS incubated and spread and people were using it because it cost nothing whereas carrying out the same transaction using voice clearly did cost. Eventually after a few months the network operators finally got their act together and managed to implement SMS charging for prepay users- such that they could decrement the prepay credit by the cost of an SMS message.
Introduction to SMS and SMS Messaging Services The Short Message Service (SMS), as defined within the GSM digital mobile phone standard that is popular in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa and some parts of North America, has several unique features: A single SMS can be up to 160 characters of text in length. Those 160 characters can comprise of words or numbers or an alphanumeric combination. Non-text based SMS' (for example, in binary format) are also supported. SMS is a store and forward service, in other words, SMS' are not sent directly from sender to recipient, but always via an SMS Center instead. Each mobile telephone network that supports SMS has one or more messaging centers to handle and manage the short messages. SMS features confirmation of message delivery. This means that unlike paging, users do not simply send an SMS and trust and hope that it gets delivered. Instead the sender of the short message can receive a return message back notifying them whether the SMS has been delivered or not. SMS' can be sent and received simultaneously with GSM voice, Data and Fax calls. This is possible because whereas voice, Data and Fax calls take over a dedicated radio channel for the duration of the call, short messages travel over and above the radio channel using the signaling path. As such, users of SMS rarely if ever get a busy or engaged signal as they can do during peak network usage times. Ways of sending multiple SMS' are available. SMS concatenation (stringing several short messages together) and SMS compression (getting more than 160 characters of information within a single short message) have been defined and incorporated in the GSM SMS standards.
The original SMS system was developed as part of the GSM family of standards, able to deliver messages of up to 160 characters. At the time, 2G GSM was in the process of evolving into the 2.5G GPRS of roughly double the performance. A short 160 character limit no longer made sense, so the "Third-Generation Partnership Program" (3GPP) proposed extending the existing SMS standard to allow messages of any length. Additionally, they proposed adding MIME support for file attachments, and real multimedia support. However, modifying display systems to handle any sort of media format was a more difficult problem, so 3GPP partnered with the WAP standards process to produce MMS. Since then, MMS has been deployed worldwide and across both GSM/GPRS and networks. The first commercial MMS launched worldwide was in March 2002 by Telenor, in Norway, using Acision infrastructure. MMS remains part of the 3G networks as well and will almost certainly be retained in the 4G networks currently being developed. Both 3GPP and 3rd Generation Partnership Project 2 3GPP2 have delegated the development of the Stage 3 Technical Realizations to the Open Mobile Alliance OMA, a standards organization focused on specifications for the mobile wireless networks.There are some interesting challenges with MMS that do not exist with SMS: Handset configuration can cause problems sending and receiving MMS messages. * Content adaptation: Multimedia content created by one brand of MMS phone may not be entirely compatible with the capabilities of the recipients' MMS phone. In the MMS architecture, the recipient MMSC is responsible for providing for content adaptation (e.g., image resizing, audio codec transcoding, etc.), if this feature is enabled by the mobile network operator. When content adaptation is supported by a network operator, its MMS subscribers enjoy compatibility with a larger network of MMS users than would otherwise be available. * Distribution lists: Current MMS specifications do not include distribution lists nor methods by which large numbers of recipients can be conveniently addressed, particularly by content providers, called Value-added service providers (VASPs) in 3GPP. Since most SMSC vendors have adopted FTP as an ad-hoc method by which large distribution lists are transferred to the SMSC prior to being used in a bulk-messaging SMS submission, it is expected that MMSC vendors will also adopt FTP. * Bulk messaging: The flow of peer-to-peer MMS messaging involves several over-the-air transactions that become inefficient when MMS is used to send messages to large numbers of subscribers, as is typically the case for VASPs. For example, when one MMS message is submitted to a very large number of recipients, it is possible to receive a delivery report and read-reply report for each and every recipient. Future MMS specification work is likely to optimize and reduce the transactional overhead for the bulk-messaging case. * Handset Configuration: Unlike SMS, MMS requires a number of handset parameters to be set. Poor handset configuration is often blamed as the first point of failure for many users. Service settings are sometimes preconfigured on the handset, but mobile operators are now looking at new device management technologies as a means of delivering the necessary settings for data services (MMS, WAP, etc.) via over-the-air programming (OTA).
For more Information Contact us on : sandip@routesms.com or vist www.routesms.com
Introduction to SMS and SMS Messaging Services The Short Message Service (SMS), as defined within the GSM digital mobile phone standard that is popular in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa and some parts of North America, has several unique features: A single SMS can be up to 160 characters of text in length. Those 160 characters can comprise of words or numbers or an alphanumeric combination. Non-text based SMS' (for example, in binary format) are also supported. SMS is a store and forward service, in other words, SMS' are not sent directly from sender to recipient, but always via an SMS Center instead. Each mobile telephone network that supports SMS has one or more messaging centers to handle and manage the short messages. SMS features confirmation of message delivery. This means that unlike paging, users do not simply send an SMS and trust and hope that it gets delivered. Instead the sender of the short message can receive a return message back notifying them whether the SMS has been delivered or not. SMS' can be sent and received simultaneously with GSM voice, Data and Fax calls. This is possible because whereas voice, Data and Fax calls take over a dedicated radio channel for the duration of the call, short messages travel over and above the radio channel using the signaling path. As such, users of SMS rarely if ever get a busy or engaged signal as they can do during peak network usage times. Ways of sending multiple SMS' are available. SMS concatenation (stringing several short messages together) and SMS compression (getting more than 160 characters of information within a single short message) have been defined and incorporated in the GSM SMS standards.
The original SMS system was developed as part of the GSM family of standards, able to deliver messages of up to 160 characters. At the time, 2G GSM was in the process of evolving into the 2.5G GPRS of roughly double the performance. A short 160 character limit no longer made sense, so the "Third-Generation Partnership Program" (3GPP) proposed extending the existing SMS standard to allow messages of any length. Additionally, they proposed adding MIME support for file attachments, and real multimedia support. However, modifying display systems to handle any sort of media format was a more difficult problem, so 3GPP partnered with the WAP standards process to produce MMS. Since then, MMS has been deployed worldwide and across both GSM/GPRS and networks. The first commercial MMS launched worldwide was in March 2002 by Telenor, in Norway, using Acision infrastructure. MMS remains part of the 3G networks as well and will almost certainly be retained in the 4G networks currently being developed. Both 3GPP and 3rd Generation Partnership Project 2 3GPP2 have delegated the development of the Stage 3 Technical Realizations to the Open Mobile Alliance OMA, a standards organization focused on specifications for the mobile wireless networks.There are some interesting challenges with MMS that do not exist with SMS: Handset configuration can cause problems sending and receiving MMS messages. * Content adaptation: Multimedia content created by one brand of MMS phone may not be entirely compatible with the capabilities of the recipients' MMS phone. In the MMS architecture, the recipient MMSC is responsible for providing for content adaptation (e.g., image resizing, audio codec transcoding, etc.), if this feature is enabled by the mobile network operator. When content adaptation is supported by a network operator, its MMS subscribers enjoy compatibility with a larger network of MMS users than would otherwise be available. * Distribution lists: Current MMS specifications do not include distribution lists nor methods by which large numbers of recipients can be conveniently addressed, particularly by content providers, called Value-added service providers (VASPs) in 3GPP. Since most SMSC vendors have adopted FTP as an ad-hoc method by which large distribution lists are transferred to the SMSC prior to being used in a bulk-messaging SMS submission, it is expected that MMSC vendors will also adopt FTP. * Bulk messaging: The flow of peer-to-peer MMS messaging involves several over-the-air transactions that become inefficient when MMS is used to send messages to large numbers of subscribers, as is typically the case for VASPs. For example, when one MMS message is submitted to a very large number of recipients, it is possible to receive a delivery report and read-reply report for each and every recipient. Future MMS specification work is likely to optimize and reduce the transactional overhead for the bulk-messaging case. * Handset Configuration: Unlike SMS, MMS requires a number of handset parameters to be set. Poor handset configuration is often blamed as the first point of failure for many users. Service settings are sometimes preconfigured on the handset, but mobile operators are now looking at new device management technologies as a means of delivering the necessary settings for data services (MMS, WAP, etc.) via over-the-air programming (OTA).
For more Information Contact us on : sandip@routesms.com or vist www.routesms.com
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