A simple SMS was the kick-off of text messaging. "Merry Christmas" wrote programmer Neil Papworth on his computer, sending the first text message on 3 December 1992 to the mobile phone of a Vodafone executive, Richard Yarvis. But he received no reply. 30 years ago there were no mobile phones with the technology to allow them to send and receive text messages. But that changed just 15 months later.
The first starting signal for short messaging was given 15 months later in Hanover at the CeBIT computer fair in 1994. In the years that followed there was a huge rise in text messaging. In 2012 German citizens sent almost 60 billion messages, a record year! By then prices had already fallen significantly. When SMS started to become commonplace, mobile network providers charged very high rates for 160-character text messages.
In Germany, each text message typically cost 39 pfennigs and with the introduction of the euro the price did not change significantly, with each SMS costing 19 cents. The billions of SMS created a huge cash flow to the companies. In 1998 the threshold of one billion text messages sent in Germany was exceeded for the first time. Due to increasing competition, however, prices were on a downward trend. So consumers today pay a fixed monthly price, which usually includes short messages and a phone call limit.
Technology has overtaken SMS
The rise of messenger services over the last decade has greatly affected mobile operators, who are unlikely to charge extra for SMS. "In 2009, WhatsApp appeared on the market, a service that helped instant messaging to penetrate the market, leading to the shrinking of text messaging," says Bernhard Rolender, managing director of the German digital association Bitkom.
According to figures from the Federal Network Agency, the number of SMS sent in 2021 amounted to about 7.8 billion, a relative recovery according to Bitkom's calculations from 2020 when the total number was around 7 billion. SMS, however, still holds an important function in the digital age. "The simple SMS can and does work on any mobile phone and does not require an internet connection or separate registration," says Bernhard Rolender. Many payment services, such as banking, also use text messages to verify and identify a person.
SMS survive to this day
In the beginning, sending messages was not a particularly easy process. Older mobile phone users may remember mobile phones that had only the digits 0 to 9. Each of these digits was assigned many letters and characters, which had to be activated by pressing buttons several times. For this reason many abbreviations were used, as is still the case today, e.g. HBD which stands for Happy Birthday, the appropriate wish for the SMS itself today!
But today smartphone users can simply dictate messages with their voice. Research by Bitkom records that half of users dictate their messages in this way. There is still no longer a limit to the characters you can send.
The written form of communication is still quite popular. In 2021 almost 800 million messages were sent every day in Germany via smartphones and various messaging services, including SMS. That is an average of 10 to 20 messages sent on a mobile phone per day. However, only the classic SMS are of minor importance.
Source: Deutsche Welle
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