SMS
Short Message Service (SMS) is a service made available on most digital mobile phones that permits the sending of short messages (also known as text messages) between mobile phones. SMS was originally designed as part of the GSM digital mobile phone standard, but is now available on a wide range of networks, including forthcoming 3G networks.
The message payload is 140 bytes: either 160 7-bit characters, 140 8-bit characters, or 70 2-byte characters in languages such as Chinese, Korean or Japanese when encoded to use 2 bytes to encode a character (see Unicode). This does not include routing and other metadata, which is additional to the payload size.
SMS is very popular in Europe, Asia and Australia, but is relatively less used in the United States.
It is particularly popular amongst young urbanites. In the favoured markets, it is comparatively cheap (for example, in Australia a message typically costs 20-25 Australian cents to send, whilst a voice call costs anywhere between $0.40 and $2.00 per minute) and it is possible to send and receive messages in noisy environments (for instance, bars) that would defeat a voice conversation.
SMS's have caused subtle but interesting changes and society since they became popular. Newsworthy events (in chronological order include):
- In January 2001, Joseph Estrada was forced to resign from the post of president of the Philippines. The popular campaign against him was widely reported to have been co-ordinated with SMS 'chain letters'.
- In July 2001, Malaysia's Government decreed that an Islamic divorce (which consists of saying "I divorce you" three times in succession) was not valid if sent by SMS.