The history of SMS development is very interesting. For 14 years this service remained unclaimed, and then in a short period of time it became almost the main source of additional income for most operators. It all started back in 1991, when the Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) proposed a mechanism for exchanging small blocks of text information between mobile subscriber stations. In December 1992, Vodafone engineer Neil Papworth sent colleagues the world’s first SMS message containing a short congratulations on the upcoming Christmas from his phone. A technology was born that subsequently changed the mobile lives of millions of people around the world. The new promising technology was not immediately recognized. Although the ability to send and receive short text messages was embedded in the GSM standard itself, operators were in no hurry to bring a new service to the market. The reasons are obvious – at that time the mobile market was just being formed, there was no clear understanding of how the new service could be used from a commercial point of view, and the number of users interested in the service was small. And no one wanted to take on the additional costs of promoting an unknown technology to anyone – why risk it when even ordinary mobile communication services were an unacceptable luxury for many at that time, and subscribers were happy to pay a lot of money just for the opportunity to talk on the phone? Around the end of the last century, the telephone gradually began to turn from a way of communication between managers and professionals into a device used en masse. At this moment, the rebirth of SMS began – the youth who turned out to be “mobilized” saw in the new service an opportunity to save money, as well as a new means of self-expression. Due to the relatively low cost of one SMS message, the new service began to bring very good money, and, consequently, received market recognition. Operators who “sensed” the benefits launched active advertising support for the new service, and in 2000 allowed their customers to send SMS to users of other networks. All this dramatically increased the attractiveness of the service and also served as a factor in the penetration of SMS to the masses.
By sending a message, the mobile phone will provide it with all the information necessary for proper delivery to the recipient (of course, for this you need to configure this function correctly. In addition, modern phone models will automatically split the message you typed too long into separate SMS packets and send them as several SMS messages. In GSM networks, SMS messages are transmitted using the same network infrastructure through which the voice signal is delivered. An SMS message, before getting into the addressee’s phone, will travel a long way from the nearest base receiving and transmitting station (BS) through the switching centers to the SMS message processing center, and then in reverse order to the BS, near which the recipient is currently located. The basis of the SMS service organization is the message processing Center (Short Message Service Center – SMSC). It is he who receives the sent message, and he performs all the work on its reception, storage and further delivery. As a rule, the center consists of a message server that provides storage, message processing, and a gateway device through which the server interacts with elements of the network infrastructure. The gateway device provides the message server with an interface with voice and email services and provides communication with external message sources for this network, for example, SMS centers from other mobile systems. If the recipient is out of reach, the center stores the message until the subscriber appears within the visibility of the network. If the message is not delivered during the period set by the sender, the center notifies the sender and deletes the message record. In the event that the switchboard was able to establish communication with the selected subscriber, the message is transmitted through the usual signal channels and reaches the addressee’s phone. The received text is displayed on the screen and stored in the identification module of the cell phone (SIM card). If the connection with the mobile station did not take place (the subscriber was busy), the switchboard reports this to the SMSC center and asks to repeat the transmission when communication becomes possible. Messages intended for mobile users can be sent to SMSC from subscribers of the same or other networks via data transmission channels of various information services, as well as manually dialed by the operator of the center receiving calls via regular telephone lines. In GSM networks, SMS messages can be received directly during a subscriber’s telephone conversation without significantly affecting speech and service traffic.
T9 fast text input technology.
To make it easier for the user to dial SMS, the company Tegic at one time proposed the T9 technology. The official definition is: “T9 is a text input system that allows users to easily enter text on devices with a limited size keyboard.” The “popular” interpretation of this technology sounds like text input with a prediction (predictive). Tegic prefers to call it an intelligent input system. This is the purpose of the technology – to become a text input standard. But it is still far from a single standard, the reason is the appearance of similar input systems. For example, Motorola decided to “reinvent the wheel” and made its own text input technology – iTAP on the same principle. At the moment, T9 supports 27 languages, including Russian.