The history of the emergence of SMS technology
We all know the abbreviation SMS. The fact that this is a service for exchanging short text messages between subscribers of cellular networks is now known even to every child who was handed the first mobile phone before entering school. But not everyone knows how this technology works and how it appeared. Today we would like to tell you the story of the appearance of SMS, where an important role was played by Nokia. We will also touch on certain aspects of the implementation of this technology and some interesting facts.
SMS text messaging service is the most common data transmission service in the world - in 2011, almost 4 billion subscribers used the SMS service.
The SMS service, as it is easy to guess from the similarity of the idea, originates from radio telegraphs and pagers. She used standardized telephone protocols that became part of the GSM standard series in 1985, which defined a message limit of 160 characters. Since then, support for this service has been added to other mobile technologies like ANSI CDMA networks and Digital AMPS, as well as satellite and terrestrial networks.
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The GSM group was assembled by the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations (CEPT) to create a single cellular system of the 900 MHz band in Europe. The initial action plan of the group stated that “services provided in public switched telephone networks and data transmission networks should be available in mobile systems”. The implementation was supposed to include text messaging both directly between mobile stations and the transfer of messages through Message Handling Systems, an e-mail protocol that was very common at that time. The action plan was adopted in December 1982.
The SMS concept was developed by the Franco-German GSM association in 1984 by Friedhelm Hillbrand and Bernard Gilbert. The innovative feature of SMS was brevity. GSM is optimized for telephony, so the main idea of ​​SMS was to send messages via signal paths necessary to monitor voice telephony traffic (communication quality, information on incoming calls) during the absence of signal traffic. As a result, unused system resources could be used to send messages at minimal cost. However, it was necessary to limit the length of messages to 128 bytes (later this number increased to 140 bytes) so that SMS messages could be used in existing networks. This concept allowed SMS to be implemented at each mobile station through simple software updates.
The first proposal, which gave rise to the development of SMS, was made thanks to the developments of specialists from Germany and France at the GSM group meeting in Oslo in February 1985. Then, on the basis of research by German scientists, this specification was worked out by the GSM subgroup WP1 Services. By June 1985, the main GSM-group approved the SMS specification.
The main group of GSM considered SMS as a possible service for new digital cellular systems. In the GSM document entitled “Services and Services Provided by GSM” (Services and Facilities to be provided in the GSM System) two types of short messages are entered: SMS-MT and SMS-MO.
Such messages took up 140 bytes in size, plus a few more bytes of technical information: message type, sending time, message encoding scheme, source / destination address, and so on. Low weight allowed uninterrupted transfer of SMS-messages directly during a telephone conversation.
140 bytes allocated to the message, depending on the encoding scheme for the end user, mean the following restrictions on the length of the SMS:
It is worth noting one interesting fact: in the revised GSM 03.38 specification, special shift tables were added, allowing the use of 7-bit encoding for the transmission of 155-character messages, including those written in Russian (more than 20 languages). But despite the fact that the specification appeared more than 10 years ago, she did not receive global support for telephones - as a result, the Russian text message is still limited to 70 characters.
The document describing the SMS also indicated the Short Message Cell Broadcast (SMS-CB) broadcast mode. It was intended for one-sided transfer of information to mobile users within the entire cellular network, and in a certain part of it. This mode was planned to be used to send messages with ads, weather reports or, for example, traffic information.
The SMS specification was being finalized for several years, but in general it remained without any major changes.
The first SMS message with the text “Merry Christmas” was sent from computer to telephone in the UK on December 3, 1992. In 1993, the first SMS was sent over GSM networks - it was sent via Nokia phone by an intern of the same company.
The first commercial SMS center (SMSC, Short message service center) for routing messages and managing the delivery process appeared in Sweden in 1993. In the same year, for the first time in the world, the Finnish mobile operator Radiolinja began offering SMS service (by the way, on July 1, 1991, the same operator served the first GSM call in the world using equipment jointly developed by Nokia and Siemens).
Despite this, the SMS service remained unpopular for a long time, and most phones did not have the ability to send SMS. Here Nokia favorably differed from competitors: only in the Finnish manufacturer as early as in 1993, the entire line of GSM phones of the company supported sending short messages.
But in the slow spread of SMS, the mobile operators themselves were primarily to blame. For a long time, they could not decide on the tariffication of a new service, delaying its entry into the market. In addition, the operators initially did not provide the ability to send text messages to subscribers of competing operators. Thus, in Russia, the exchange of SMS-messages between various operators became possible only in 2002.
In general, the development of SMS in Russia was extremely slow, and if in the UK as early as the year 2000, there were an average of 35 SMS messages per month per subscriber, then in Russia, even in 2002, this figure barely reached 10 (according to Beeline and MTS).
Now, of course, SMS is much more popular than ten years ago: only on this New Year's Eve, subscribers of Beeline and MTS sent about a billion SMS messages!
On the other hand, with the growing popularity of Internet instant messengers for mobile devices, the popularity of SMS-messages will sooner or later begin to fade. So, WhatsApp - one of the popular mobile instant messengers that came to replace SMS - is available not only on expensive smartphones, but also on inexpensive Nokia phones on the Series 40 platform, which, by the way, have already sold more than 1.5 billion. Now, using WhatsApp, more than 12,000 messages are sent every second, but every day this number continues to grow.
Of course, SMS will not disappear for many years: the market is saturated with millions of phones without the ability to go online, and the mobile Internet is not widely distributed. However, the trend has begun: in large cities, where residents have become “better dressed” and more and more often choose smartphones, and operators have achieved full 3G coverage, a part of the population has finally lost the habit of SMS.
SMS text messaging service is the most common data transmission service in the world - in 2011, almost 4 billion subscribers used the SMS service.
The SMS service, as it is easy to guess from the similarity of the idea, originates from radio telegraphs and pagers. She used standardized telephone protocols that became part of the GSM standard series in 1985, which defined a message limit of 160 characters. Since then, support for this service has been added to other mobile technologies like ANSI CDMA networks and Digital AMPS, as well as satellite and terrestrial networks.
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Initial concept
The GSM group was assembled by the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations (CEPT) to create a single cellular system of the 900 MHz band in Europe. The initial action plan of the group stated that “services provided in public switched telephone networks and data transmission networks should be available in mobile systems”. The implementation was supposed to include text messaging both directly between mobile stations and the transfer of messages through Message Handling Systems, an e-mail protocol that was very common at that time. The action plan was adopted in December 1982.
The SMS concept was developed by the Franco-German GSM association in 1984 by Friedhelm Hillbrand and Bernard Gilbert. The innovative feature of SMS was brevity. GSM is optimized for telephony, so the main idea of ​​SMS was to send messages via signal paths necessary to monitor voice telephony traffic (communication quality, information on incoming calls) during the absence of signal traffic. As a result, unused system resources could be used to send messages at minimal cost. However, it was necessary to limit the length of messages to 128 bytes (later this number increased to 140 bytes) so that SMS messages could be used in existing networks. This concept allowed SMS to be implemented at each mobile station through simple software updates.
Early development
The first proposal, which gave rise to the development of SMS, was made thanks to the developments of specialists from Germany and France at the GSM group meeting in Oslo in February 1985. Then, on the basis of research by German scientists, this specification was worked out by the GSM subgroup WP1 Services. By June 1985, the main GSM-group approved the SMS specification.
The main group of GSM considered SMS as a possible service for new digital cellular systems. In the GSM document entitled “Services and Services Provided by GSM” (Services and Facilities to be provided in the GSM System) two types of short messages are entered: SMS-MT and SMS-MO.
- Short message Mobile Terminated (SMS-MT): the ability of a network to transmit a message sent to a mobile phone;
- Short message Mobile Originated (SMS-MO): The ability of a network to transmit a message sent from a mobile phone.
Such messages took up 140 bytes in size, plus a few more bytes of technical information: message type, sending time, message encoding scheme, source / destination address, and so on. Low weight allowed uninterrupted transfer of SMS-messages directly during a telephone conversation.
140 bytes allocated to the message, depending on the encoding scheme for the end user, mean the following restrictions on the length of the SMS:
- 160 characters when using the 7-bit encoding described in the GSM 03.38 specification (Latin alphabet and main characters, which can be found by reference );
- 140 characters when using 8-bit encoding. This encoding is used when writing an SMS in a language that uses Latin characters with accents, for example, German or French;
- 70 characters using 16-bit UTF-16 encoding. This encoding is used to support other national languages: Russian, Chinese, Arabic, and so on.
It is worth noting one interesting fact: in the revised GSM 03.38 specification, special shift tables were added, allowing the use of 7-bit encoding for the transmission of 155-character messages, including those written in Russian (more than 20 languages). But despite the fact that the specification appeared more than 10 years ago, she did not receive global support for telephones - as a result, the Russian text message is still limited to 70 characters.
The document describing the SMS also indicated the Short Message Cell Broadcast (SMS-CB) broadcast mode. It was intended for one-sided transfer of information to mobile users within the entire cellular network, and in a certain part of it. This mode was planned to be used to send messages with ads, weather reports or, for example, traffic information.
The SMS specification was being finalized for several years, but in general it remained without any major changes.
Technology implementation
The first SMS message with the text “Merry Christmas” was sent from computer to telephone in the UK on December 3, 1992. In 1993, the first SMS was sent over GSM networks - it was sent via Nokia phone by an intern of the same company.
The first commercial SMS center (SMSC, Short message service center) for routing messages and managing the delivery process appeared in Sweden in 1993. In the same year, for the first time in the world, the Finnish mobile operator Radiolinja began offering SMS service (by the way, on July 1, 1991, the same operator served the first GSM call in the world using equipment jointly developed by Nokia and Siemens).
Despite this, the SMS service remained unpopular for a long time, and most phones did not have the ability to send SMS. Here Nokia favorably differed from competitors: only in the Finnish manufacturer as early as in 1993, the entire line of GSM phones of the company supported sending short messages.
But in the slow spread of SMS, the mobile operators themselves were primarily to blame. For a long time, they could not decide on the tariffication of a new service, delaying its entry into the market. In addition, the operators initially did not provide the ability to send text messages to subscribers of competing operators. Thus, in Russia, the exchange of SMS-messages between various operators became possible only in 2002.
In general, the development of SMS in Russia was extremely slow, and if in the UK as early as the year 2000, there were an average of 35 SMS messages per month per subscriber, then in Russia, even in 2002, this figure barely reached 10 (according to Beeline and MTS).
Now, of course, SMS is much more popular than ten years ago: only on this New Year's Eve, subscribers of Beeline and MTS sent about a billion SMS messages!
On the other hand, with the growing popularity of Internet instant messengers for mobile devices, the popularity of SMS-messages will sooner or later begin to fade. So, WhatsApp - one of the popular mobile instant messengers that came to replace SMS - is available not only on expensive smartphones, but also on inexpensive Nokia phones on the Series 40 platform, which, by the way, have already sold more than 1.5 billion. Now, using WhatsApp, more than 12,000 messages are sent every second, but every day this number continues to grow.
Of course, SMS will not disappear for many years: the market is saturated with millions of phones without the ability to go online, and the mobile Internet is not widely distributed. However, the trend has begun: in large cities, where residents have become “better dressed” and more and more often choose smartphones, and operators have achieved full 3G coverage, a part of the population has finally lost the habit of SMS.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/139793/
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