Across the street or around the world...

How Text Messaging Works?

Text messaging was originally designed by engineers to allow cellular carriers a way to communicate directly with their customers. This offered a way to advise a customer that a message was waiting, a cell site was down, a bill was due and so on.

Ultimately, users discovered that this "short message service" (SMS) could be used to send a message from one cell phone to another - called "peer to peer" (P2P) - to send brief messages (up to 160 characters) to each other. It became remarkably popular in Europe first and then quickly spread to Asia. The United States was really the last area in which text messaging became popular but the popularity has rocketed in the last couple of years.

These short messages are sent over a carrier's control channel and thus do not take up any space on the voice channels carriers use to transmit regular phone calls. They are very small bits of data and are typically transmitted when there is an extra "slot" in the control channel's availability. Normally the messages are sent very quickly - sometimes within seconds - but delivery speed is not guaranteed. There is a certain amount of latency in the system at times, although it is uncommon.

The first text message was sent in 1989 from New York City to Melbourne beach Florida.

The first commercial SMS message was sent in 1992 in England.

Who is using text messaging?

Today text messaging is the most widely used mobile data service on the planet, with 72% of all cellular phone users worldwide or 1.9 billion out of 2.7 billion phone subscribers being active users of the short message service.

In countries like Finland, Norway, and Sweden over 90% of the population use SMS. The European average is about 85% and North America is rapidly catching up with over 50% active users of SMS by the end of 2007.

More than 11 billion text messages are sent monthly in the United States today. Up 279% from the 2.9 billion sent in 2004 even in a recessionary economy.

According to studies conducted by the Mobile Marketing Association and the Pew Internet project, they found that 60% of Americans under the age of 30 use their cell phones to send or receive text messages on a daily basis.

The study also found that 50% of all US. Cellular user’s text on a regular daily basis. The split by age group is as follows:

13 to 24 = 80%

18 to 27 = 63%

28 to 39 = 31%

40 to 49 = 18%