the-BA : Where did texting come from?

Alan Cox reveals all

Twenty-five years ago, it was easier to buy a Rolls Royce than a mobile phone. How things have changed!

In January 1985, Vodafone started service in the UK with analogue mobiles. This became very popular with millions of customers for the first time, and not just those in Rolls Royces! But it was primarily a mobile telephone service, with hardly any data. The many networks across Europe were incompatible, so it was impossible to roam – if you travelled, you left your phone at home.

GSM

Groupe Spécial Mobile (GSM) started as a political exercise, planned in the early 1980s, for a pan-European service across Europe, with the ambitious target of one million customers for the millennium. There are now over 1700 million customers in over 200 countries and territories around the world.
GSM started as a committee of experts, first meeting in December 1982 in Stockholm. The committee’s first task was to set the fundamental requirements of the system and by 1985 they had agreed on a digital service with integrated speech and data, allowing extra services to be built in. These were seen, in priority order, as facsimile, and modem services. Then someone thought of using spare capacity in the signalling for sending short messages.

SMS - texting

I was a founder member of the working group of the GSM committee which specified all the data services and was particularly interested in SMS. The main use of SMS was seen as delivering alerts for voicemail and fax mail.
It uses a simple store and forward system. A message is sent to the Service Centre which then checks whether the destination is reachable (it might be switched off or out of coverage). If OK, it sends the message; otherwise it holds it until the destination is ready.
The basic message is of a standard size, to fill a single packet on early data signalling systems (272 bytes). Since GSM is a digital system, signalling messages, including SMS, can be sent in parallel to the traffic (eg speech). The original plan was for up to around 200 bytes of message plus the header, which, like an envelope, is needed to give the source and destination addresses. Unfortunately, the header started life as big as the content, so we had work hard to cut this down to size. We ended up with a message content of 140 bytes, organised as 160 seven bit characters (English alphabet) or 80 fourteen bit characters (covering every known language and alphabet).

The market place

Initial take-up of SMS was very slow – it was used mainly for voicemail alerts. It was not very popular for mobile originated texting: the keyboard was tedious and networks didn’t talk to each other. Customers would often not know which network was used by their intended recipient, so messages might not get delivered, although they would be charged for.
After several years in the doldrums, SMS suddenly took off. Why?
We enabled networks to talk to each other, making delivery reliable. With pre-pay, younger people could have a phone in their own right. They have nimble fingers so could use small keyboards, while also inventing their own text language (no need to spell!) “T9 entry”, for adults who can spell, came later. Thus texting became easy to use and also to reply to, except while driving!

Some Statistics

Over 1 trillion text messages were sent in 2005, of which over 12 billion were sent in China alone during the Lunar New Year holiday. Over 3 billion per month were sent in the UK.

What’s new?

Text can now be sent from proper keyboards, not just small phones, so they may become longer than 160 characters. Messages can now be of any length by linking them together. Multi-media Messaging (MMS) adds a whole new dimension – messages can now be a thousand times larger. This allows the very popular addition of pictures and also of sounds. It goes much quicker now we have 3G.

By the way, what happened to…? Facsimile??? When did you last send a fax? Cell Broadcast – a broadcast version of SMS. We thought this had many commercial opportunities, but these have not been exploited.The moral is very hard to predict which services the customer will die for – the killer app!

Alan Cox is Head of Strategic Projects, Technology Development, at the Vodafone Group. He was formerly Head of International Standards
Alan.Cox@vodafone.com

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