When did SMS begin? - A Brief History of SMS

On December 1991, an engineer named Neil Papworth sent the very first SMS with the mesage "MERRY CHRISTMAS" to his colleagues at Vodafone in Great Britain. But it was not until 1999 that SMSing really took off, when teenagers discovered the wonders of this simple communication tool.

SMS continues to be a phenomenal success as the cheapest, quickest and easiest to use form of peer-to-peer mobile communication.

Neil Strother, analyst for Jupiter Research says "The mobile phone is a very personal device. People take it with them everywhere they go — especially people 35 and under. So you can easily develop a one-to-one relationship with your customers through their mobile phones."

"Messages sent to a mobile phone are much more likely to be read than e-mail sent to a PC, which may get routed to a spam folder", Strother adds.

SMS Today

A new report from Portio Research forecasts a healthy future for SMS. By 2012 global SMS revenues are expected to reach 67bn USD, driven by 3.7 trillion messages.

In Asia, in the five minutes it takes to read this press release and in every subsequent five minute period for the next six years, 2,267 people will have bought their first ever mobile phone. This translates into an additional 1.4bn new mobile subscribers in Asia alone with a consequent boom in SMS traffic in the region.

SMS Usage in Singapore

According to the Department of Statistics, Singaporeans sent and received a total of 10486.45 million SMSes in 2006, translating into an average of 873.87 million messages per month.