We have written many times about SMS mail-outs and their benefits for your business. Today we want to go back to basics and talk about the SMS messages themselves.

What is SMS?

SMS is a technology that allows people to receive and send short text messages using a cellular phone.

Here some interesting facts about SMS:

  1. Finnish engineer Matti McConen didn’t seek a patent for the idea of SMS when he came up with it in 1984 while working at Nokia, because he didn’t believe he had made a “patentable innovation”. He didn’t make a penny from his invention.
  2. In 1985, German engineer Friedhelm Hillebrand sat at a typewriter, writing random sentences to try to determine the length required for a text message, and found that for most sentences or questions, 160 characters were “completely sufficient”. This limit is still in use today.
  3. In 1992, The British engineer Neil Papworth became the first person to send an SMS. On December 3, 1992, he sent an early Christmas greeting from his computer to his phone. It simply said ‘Merry Christmas’.
  4. Nokia introduced the SMS function in 1993. Before that, phones couldn’t compose SMS messages. The ability to send text messages between phones of different networks only appeared in the UK in 1999.
  5. The original sound for an incoming SMS on a Nokia phone was actually Morse code for “SMS”. This tone was heard everywhere in the 90s.
  6. SMS are usually delivered within no more than 10 seconds. The sender can receive a delivery notification.
  7. You can send a message to an offline or out-of-coverage phone. As soon as the subscriber appears on the network, they will receive the message. If the sender receives delivery notifications, then this can record the moment when the recipient appears on the network.
  8. You can send a message to a subscriber who is currently busy having a phone call.
  9. A feature of the technology is that it is very undemanding of the cellular network, requiring only minimal coverage.
  10. Worldwide, in 2016, 8.3 trillion SMS messages were sent, or nearly 23 billion messages a day.

SMS messages are still one of the most convenient ways to quickly transfer information between subscribers. Sending these messages doesn’t require the user to have the latest smartphone or a connection to the Internet. Also, the cost of SMS messages makes them an affordable option.

If you want to use SMS messages to send up-to-date information about your business to your customers, you can find all the necessary information on our website in the Solutions section.

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