15 years of text messages, a 'cultural phenomenon'

"Merry Christmas" may not be

the most original greeting in the world,

Neil Papworth admits today, but as he

was about to send the world's first text

message to a cellphone, it struck him

as fittingly festive, certainly more so

than "Mr. Watson, come here," the first

words spoken over the telephone.

Besides, Richard Jarvis, the man at the

receiving end of the transmission, was

at a Christmas party near Vodafone

headquarters in Newbury, England,

when the mother of all text messages

was about to land 15 years ago this

week.

Since cellphones were not yet

designed to type out and send

individual letters of the alphabet,

Papworth, then a 22-year-old engineer, sent his historic greeting to Jarvis's phone from a

computer keyboard.

It took another couple of years before cellphones were made to send text easily, more time to

work out billing deals and systems among phone companies - and then just a short while more

before teenagers discovered them.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Today, billions of text messages fly through the airwaves every day, and they are a bedrock of

revenue and profit for the world's telecommunications companies. They have inspired their own

shorthand in languages written around the world; some relationships live and die on the strength of

the 160-character, thumb-typed phone texts.

Though textos still convey holiday greetings - New Year's is the busiest texting day of the year -

they also are used to vote for politicians and celebrities, play trivia games and enter quiz shows,

buy rugby and concert tickets, organize rallies and turn out the opposition, alert travelers to

transportation delays, warn groups of people of weather and other emergency situations, advertise

products and services, lend money and let you know if your bank account is overdrawn.

"It is a cultural phenomenon," said Mike Short, chairman of the Mobile Data Association in

England, where the number of text messages sent each week just passed one billion, about 25

percent higher than a year earlier.

Few experts could come up with a recent, reliable figure for the number of total texts sent in the

course of a year; Short ballparked it at two trillion to three trillion. Yet communications experts are

divided about whether the lowly text message will survive another 15 years.

Various alternative phone messaging systems that demand more technology - like the chatty backand-

forth of instant messaging, the wish-you-were-here quality of photo messages, or e-mail

messages transmitted via the Internet - are waiting in the wings to overtake the SMS, the technical term for the industry's "short message service."

The cost and complexity of the newer rivals have so far held them back. For any system to take

off, it needs to work seamlessly across the networks of all of the scores of mobile carriers around

the world, a time-consuming process of bilateral negotiations that delayed the boom in texting until

years after its creation.

In December 1992, just sending "Merry Christmas" to a single phone was complex. For its time,

when cellphones themselves were still a novelty, the text message sent to the Vodafone engineers

"was quite a feat," Short said.

Jarvis and the teams at the predecessor companies of Vodafone and Airwide Solutions, where

Papworth works, intended their text experiments as an enhancement for pagers, the popular

communications gadget of the day for executives.

Brennan Hayden, who was an engineer in the 1990s for an Irish wireless company, Aldiscon,

which invested in text messaging, said few people in telecommunications believed at the time that

it would take off as a communications medium of its own.

"They said people would never use it, they wouldn't be bothered to type messages on a phone,"

said Hayden, now with WirelessDeveloper Agency in Michigan.

"I always believed in it," he said. "I believed it could actually be a force to change the world."

In June 1993, Hayden sent the first commercial text message in Los Angeles. His SMS, meant to

signify the birth of a new form of communications, was "burp."

Jay Seaton, chief marketing officer at Airwide, believes the messaging types are "not mutually

exclusive" and that people will use the kind that works for them. In western nations, for instance,

texting is favored by the young.

"The industry is still struggling to find new services that are anywhere near as popular and

profitable," said John Delaney, principal analyst at Ovum, who attended an anniversary party that

Airwide held in London this week. "SMS is simple, ubiquitous, easy to use and cost-effective.

The most recent up-and-coming threat is messaging that uses the language and programming of

the Internet. Just as voice calls can be made from personal computers, texts can be sent from

personal computers to mobile phones as well, and Internet companies like Yahoo, along with

college student start-ups, are introducing ways of undercutting the mobile carriers' prices.

Cost, in fact, is still a sensitive area for the text message. While many people believe text

messaging is free because it is packaged with their mobile subscription, individual messages

outside of the monthly bundle cost around 10 to 15 euro cents each. With a wholesale price of a

few pennies, that gives telecom carriers a sizable profit margin.

But calling the text message pure profit for the carrier, Short said, "would be an overstatement"

and not take into account the investments and enhancements that companies make in the

networks to carry the texts.

"Problems with undelivered SMS are very rarely raised these days," Short said, compared to the

late 1990s.

When Hayden sends a message from his BlackBerry today, he always chooses the SMS menu

option over the e-mail one, and not just for sentimental reasons.

"It's easier to type in a phone number than an e-mail address," he said, "and for the recipient,

there's less hassle to go through to see it."

Papworth admits to finding text messaging quite useful from time to time. A year ago, he was

pleased to be able to use group texting to announce the birth of his daughter to a dozen friends

around the world at once with a single message, he said.

He was chagrined to hear, however, that when a friend told his daughter that he knew the man

who sent the first SMS, the daughter replied, "He's still alive?"

Bron: International Herald Tribune