Once upon a time, mobile phones could not send SMS

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 04 August 2010 13:22

Opinion and Analysis

According to self-styled "SMS expert" Sheri Wells of US based SMS Media Group, the GSM short-messaging technology is this week celebrating its 25th anniversary. The significant anniversary in Australia however is early April 2000, when Australia's mobile operators finally allowed messages to be delivered between their networks.

"The standardisation of SMS was developed in 1985 by a collaborated effort between Germany and France. SMS was created by Friedhelm Hillebrand, Bernard Ghillebaert, and Oculy Silaban," Wells writes.

That event however went largely un-noticed outside the inner circles of the world's cellular industry. Seven more years were to pass before the first SMS message, in the real world, was sent.

According to Wells, "The first text message (Happy Christmas) was sent in on December 3, 1992 over the Vodafone GSM network in the United Kingdom from Neil Papworth of Sema Group from an R&D lab using a personal computer to Richard Jarvis of Vodafone."

In Australia, I reported in Exchange the first SMS service being launched by Telstra on its GSM network on 25 July 1994. However it was not a user-to-user messaging service, but a service under which Telstra operators received incoming messages, transcribed these and sent them to the user's phone as an SMS message. It went by the name 'Mobilenet Memo'.

Almost three years went by before Telstra allowed its mobile customers to send SMS to each other, by which time Vodafone was already offering the service.

Telstra completely missed the potential market, suggesting the main use of the facility would be for non-phone devices that could communicate over the GSM network. One example shown was a car-mounted unit that could send a message if the car was stolen or broken into.

CONTINUED