Tomorrow, Saturday, the SMS (Short Message Service) will celebrate its 30th anniversary in France. Overall, 120 billion SMS are sent per year, or 330 million per day. Admittedly, it is losing momentum, with a 30% reduction in mailings over the past five years, and its mailings are largely automated to allow double authentication, but like e-mail, it is still standing.
It must be said that SMS has evolved as instant communication needs have become more important and diverse.
Limited to 160 characters when it was born, it was SMS, long before instant messaging, that prompted its users to modify their syntax and add the first emojis, which took this form: 🙂 – we were talking about smileys then. The number of SMS was counted in the mobile plans, after a period when they were paid for per unit, and it was not possible to send one to different recipients.
Why the use of SMS has changed
But the year 1999 changed everything in France, with the arrival of SMS interoperability between the three telco operators of the time. The 2000s therefore became the boom years for SMS.
To date, sending SMS is unlimited, and above all, it is possible to send photos and videos, with MMS. This is what explains its success, in addition to M2M uses and geographical areas poorly equipped with mobile internet, such as the African continent. Not to mention advertising. In 2023, SMS for advertising and transactional purposes should exceed the 50 billion dollar mark in revenues worldwide, estimates the firm Juniper Research.
At the same time, in France, other tools such as instant messaging have taken over, especially among the youngest, in the world of instant communication. According to a study by the Body of European Regulators in 2021, the use of instant messaging is up 53.73% among young people aged 16 to 24. At the same time, the use of SMS fell by 29% in this age group.
How the Rich Communication System and iMessage are revolutionizing SMS
Still, the evolution of SMS also involves new protocols, the property of which is no longer so much that of telecom operators, but of GAFA. The RCS (Rich Communication System) protocol promoted by Google, just like Apple’s iMessage, are indeed the modern versions of the SMS standard.
But the biggest difference between RCS and SMS is that RCS relies on the data network and not on the cellular network. And it is thanks to the data that the RCS embeds its rich communication system. Rich, because it is possible, for example, to transfer messages and their content from one user to another. Rich too, because the visuals that pass through RCS are much less compressed than in SMS.
It is also the RCS protocol that allows you to know at what time your recipient opened your message or when it begins to respond to you. Yes, as it exists on instant messengers such as Facebook Messenger or Skype.
For the record, it was on December 3, 1992 that the British operator Vodafone sent the first SMS in history. It said “Merry Christmas” on it. These 15 characters sent by engineer Neil Papworth were auctioned as NFTs in December 2021.