Thirty years later, SMS is holding up despite the dominance of social media

SMS is about to turn thirty, a respectable age in an ever-changing technological world that has given birth to applications as successful as WhatsApp, Messenger or Telegram, which apparently monopolize communication between mobile phones.

The “Short Message Service” (short messaging service) was used for the first time on December 3, 1992 in a communication between two users on the Vodafone telephone network.

And that first SMS was sold in the form of an NFT token (digital certificate) in December 2021 during an auction in Paris.

The original message was received in 1992 by Richard Jarvis, a Vodafone collaborator. It was a simple “Merry Christmas” (Merry Christmas) sent from a computer. But it was a revolution in the world of communication.

Initially the SMS was limited to 160 characters, but over time it was freed from its ties and could be enriched with stick figures (the famous emojis) and images (MMS).

SMS was expensive, but it quickly became massively popular.

With the explosion of free apps, their use has plummeted. In the United Kingdom, for example, the volume of text messages has been divided by four in ten years, reaching below the barrier of 10,000 million in the first half of 2022, according to Ofcom, the British telecommunications regulator.

SMS as a security tool

Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and then WhatsApp, Messenger, iMessage, Viber or Telegram have been cornering SMS. With no roaming charges when you have access to a Wi-Fi network, those apps have an undeniable advantage.

Among users between the ages of 16 and 24 in Europe, the use of applications and social networks grew by 53.73% in 2021, while SMS fell by 29%, according to a study by the Body of European regulators of electronic communications. .

But SMS still has a certain future ahead of it. For example in countries like Nigeria, the most populous in Africa.

In 2021, some 10 billion text messages were sent in that country, that is, 15% more than the previous year, according to a report by the Nigerian Communications Commission.

Although the vast majority of Nigerians have a cell phone, only 44% had access to the internet in 2021.

Sending an SMS in that country costs 4 nairas (0.008 euros), very cheap compared to the euro that users must pay to have 2 GB of internet connection.

Half of Nigerians live on less than two dollars a day.

The SMS defenders say on the other hand that it continues to be an indispensable tool to verify the identity of a userfor example for a bank transaction, or to confirm the arrival of a package, or to receive a security code.

In France “SMS is one of the two possible mandatory channels to warn the population” in the event of a natural disaster, or a health or terrorist emergencyrecalls Marc-Antoine Dupuis, son of engineer Philippe Dupuis, considered to be the co-inventor of the GSM standard that allowed SMS to take off.

And SMS is also still a preferred tool for advertising: more than 50,000 million dollars in 2023 worldwide, calculates the Juniper Research cabinet. (AND)