A brief history of SMS

This year SMS (Short Message Service) will celebrate its 30th birthday 🎂

Today you might use it to verify your online payment or text your grandma, but its usage and adoption over time have been quite bumpy.

1. Birth

A Franco-German corporation initiated it in the 80s, intended to check the state of the network and send messages at a lower cost. Messages were already limited to 160 characters, considered enough to send brief messages, based on what was shipped on postcards at that time.

The first SMS was sent on Dec. 3rd, 1992 on UK Vodafone networks. It was saying “Merry Christmas”. It sounds like the guys saw the future of this technology when today Christmas and New Year’s Eve are moments were SMS are the most heavily used.

Later on, the adoption was quite slow, like most new technologies. In its first years, it was mostly due to poor support for this technology by the hardware. Nokia was the first company to jump into it in 1993.

2. Rise and drop

It took a moment to start being widely adopted:

1995: 0.4 SMS /month /American

2000: 35 SMS /month /American

Since then its adoption has grown widely to reach a peak in 2011, right before the rise of smartphones. The original usage of SMS for person-to-person communication has been widely replaced by faster, cheaper, and more reliable channels like WhatsApp or iMessage.

Source: Statistica

In the meantime, SMS created a whole new culture: from crushed words to letter emojis. But all of this part deserves its post.

3. Reincarnation

Over 23 billion SMS are sent daily but their usage is different today. As a user, it’s also a lot less used to sending messages than receiving from companies.

Marketing: that represents the main usage for businesses, in which 2/3 are big companies. It’s preferred for its opening rate and efficiency. Still, it requires being used in moderation as it can quickly stain the business’s reputation.

Automation and security: it become cheaper and easier to build a system using SMS today. To verify identity and add another level of security, SMS is king.

Payments: it’s quite efficient way of paying since you never have to enter a credit card number or install an app. You probably know it for paying for parking or even paying for a bus ticket if you went to Paris.

Phishing: it’s still widely used. You received a message with a smelly URL, yep they try to still your money.

SMS had quite an interesting life, until now and it’s not dead. It already slowly found its place in our life and became a good old and reliable friend.