SMS and IMS

In contrast to parts of of the EU and Asia, notably Japan and Hong Kong, Short Message System (SMS) services have so far not achieved market penetration in Australia or North America. Recurrent predictions suggest that the local market is about to take off, driven by the under-20s cohort, but we're still waiting.

Various proprietary Instant Messenger (IM) or Instant Messaging Systems (IMS) have been promoted by individual internet service providers - notably AOL - and software developers. Those schemes are essentially PC-based (ie not mobile phone to mobile) and are generally incompatible, with many US consumers accordingly using several services.

     SMS technology

The Short Message Service (SMS) is the ability to send and receive text messages to and from mobile telephones, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and personal computers. The text can be comprised of words, numbers or an alphanumeric combination of the two. Each short message is limited to 160 characters when using Latin alphabets and 70 characters using non-Latin alphabets such as Arabic and Chinese are used.

SMS was created as part of the GSM (Global System for Mobile Communication) Phase 1 Standard. The first short message is believed to have been sent in late 1992 from a personal computer to a mobile phone on Vodafone's UK GSM network. Developers initially envisaged SMS as a tool for voice mail notification - implicitly as a pager - but in several countries there was significant early growth as particular demographics (kids, professionals, drug dealers) used the technology for person to person messaging.

Most SMS traffic involves consumers sending text from a mobile phone keypad. rather than businesses messaging to potential clients from a computer; some network operators report that 90% of total SMS traffic relates to simple person-to-person messaging. That's in line with Andrew Odlyzko's 2001 paper Content is Not King, arguing that connectivity - particularly messaging - is the 'killer app'.

The GSM Association claimed that monthly SMS traffic in the EU mid-2000 was around

Germany 200 million
Italy 150 million
Finland 75 million
UK 70 million
Norway 70 million
Sweden 70 million
Portugal 60 million
France 60 million
Spain 60 million
Denmark 50 million
Belgium 25 million
Greece 15 million

There's recurrent commercial interest in use of SMS to deliver free or subscription-based information, ranging from advertising (the SMS version of spam is fondly known as speam) to financial data, sports scores, flight information, weather and news headlines, jokes and horoscopes. Essentially, any information that can be expressed as a short text can be delivered by SMS. One example is the How to Make Money on SMS report from Danish telecommunications specialist StrandConsult.

The October 2001 Mobinet study (PDF) from EDS subsidiary AT Kearney reports that SMS is belatedly making a breakthrough among the middle aged (and middle class) mobile phone users in the EU and the US. Globally SMS use grew by 10% throughout 2001, with the highest growth among the 'post-35' cohort. Among those age 35 to 54 SMS use grew by 20%; in both the 55-64 and 65+ categories it grew by 14%.

     traffic

The GSM Association suggests that 15 billion SMS text messages were sent during December 2000, with 100 billion sent during 2000 and predicted 2001 total of 200 billion mark worldwide, with monthly global SMS figures of 25 billion. That's a lot of 'ringme', 'lovu', 'yes', 'iw2hybabs' [I Want To Have Your Babies] and 'no'.

It also claims that the average SMS traffic per GSM customer has risen from 0.4 text messages in 1995 to a monthly figure of around 35 messages in 2000, with UK users generating 756 million text messages in December 2000 (growth of around 300% pa), compared to Germans with 1.8 billion text messages.

However, there's significant disagreement about figures and their interpretation. In the UK the Mobile Data Association (MDA) reports that the number of mobile text messages declined by around 100 million (roughly 12%) in the first quarter of this year. The slump is being attributed to increased telecommunication charges - someone has to pay for the phone companies' wild spending sprees, and who better than the customers - rather than boredom.

The GSM Association refrained from attributing the political upheaval in the Philippines to SMS but notes that initial introduction of free SMS (with a monthly subscription fee) generated over 18 million messages a day. For a view of 'people power = SMS' see Vicente Rafael's paper Generation Text: the Cell Phone & the Crowd in Recent Philippine History.

In Japanese mobile phone giant NTT DoCoMo announced mid-2001 that subscribers on its wireless internet i-mode network had climbed to 20 million, 100% growth over a seven month period. DoCoMo, something of an oddity, claimed that consumers were serviced by 828 companies offering information on i-mode and between 1,500 to 40,000 sites. The uncertainty reflects questions about the compatibility of many of the sites; only a thousand or so are formally recognised by DoCoMo, which uses a proprietary standard.

Telecommunications analysts suggest that DoCoMo is now gaining around a million users each month. The use made of the service is more problematical. Many anecdotal reports suggest that the service is overwhelmingly used for 'texting', rather than 'surfing'. It's an 'always-on' packet-data transmission system. Subscribers are charged according to the volume of data they transmit, not the time spent online.

The New York-based Wireless Advertising Association (WAA), established under the auspices of the US Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) but now somewhat at odds with its parent, has established very basic and very voluntary standards for wireless advertising on mobile phones.

In Japan NTT has released a statement confirming that 13 million of the mobile phones using its I-Mode messaging service are susceptible to a virus, delivered by email, that can take over the device's basic functions. The virus directs the phone to dial the 110 emergency hotline number if the user opens the email, to mass-dial random numbers or freeze the phone's functions. The virus forms part of the email rather than an attachment.

A 2001 survey by Macromill suggests around 77% of I-Mode users aged 20 to 40 had received email from adult sites. The National Congress of Parent-Teacher Associations of Japan has established a committee to explore legal restrictions and otherwise protect minors.

     IM technology

In contrast to the 'open' SMS regime, most IM schemes are proprietary and restricted to transmissions between desktops. A brief introduction to particular schemes is here

In the US figures about market share are contentious. AOL's Instant Messenger (AIM) and ICQ appear to dominate the market, with claims of 140 million registered users and a supposed 90% of the online population. Actual use is more uncertain: one study highlighted in Analysphere for example suggested that 53 million people used at least one of three services from home (41 million used AOL services, Microsoft's MSN Messenger had over 18 million users and Yahoo! Messenger had 12 million users).

AOL competitors such as Microsoft, Prodigy (PIM), Yahoo!, AT&T and Tribal Voice have come together in the IMUnified coalition. The intention is that the group will develop an open standard, ideally reflected in a global standard that's accepted by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and perhaps tied to unified addressing initiatives such as ENUM.





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