The Origin Of Text Messages

We are using text messages in our day to day daily lives, but do you know where did SMS/text messages came from? well we must know the origin of it. So now i will give a brief history about it.

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SMS was first used in December 1992, when Neil Papworth, a 22-year-old test engineer for Sema Group (now Airwide Solutions), used a personal computer to send the text message "Merry Christmas" via the Vodafone network to the phone of Richard Jarvis.

Initial growth of text messaging was slow, with customers in 1995 sending on average only 0.4 messages per GSM customer per month. One factor in the slow take-up 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 use 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. The end of 2000, the average number of messages per user reached 35.[citation needed]

SMS was originally designed, 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.

Today text messaging is the most widely used mobile data service, with 74% of all mobile phone users worldwide or 2.4 billion out of 3.3 billion phone subscribers at end of 2007 being active users of the Short Message Service. In countries such as Finland, Sweden and Norway, over 85% of the population use SMS. The European average is about 80% and North America is rapidly catching up with over 60% active users of SMS by end of 2008. The largest average usage of the service by mobile phone subscribers is in the Philippines with an average of 27 texts sent per day by subscriber. In Singapore the average is 12 and in South Korea 10.[citation needed]

Text messaging was reported to have addictive tendencies by the Global Messaging Survey by Nokia in 2012 and was confirmed to be addictive by the study at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium in 2004. Since then the study at the University of Queensland in Australia has found that text messaging is the most addictive digital service on mobile or Internet. The text reception habit introduces a need to remain connected, called "Reachability".