On its 25th Birthday the SMS Gets a New Lease of Life

Notwithstanding the emergence of new generation OTT messaging platforms, the good old SMS is now set for a lease of life with enterprise messaging resorting to hybrid services to meet market demand.

Sticklers for good English might say it has killed the idiomatic language, and those romantically inclined may say it has ruined dating. Yet love it or hate it, texting or the simple old short messaging service (SMS), which turned 25 years this week, is here to stay.

Notwithstanding epitaphs being written for it by those who say SMS is past its prime and is ready to be written into the pages of history, the truth is, it is still widely used world over, particularly in the emerging markets and even in segments of the developed markets.

In fact, messaging services like WhatsApp, iMessage, FB Messenger, are only building up on the frameworks that software engineer Neil Papworth developed to send a short Merry Christmas message to Vodafone Director Richard Jarvis on December 3, 1992.  

While these over the top (OTT) services, thanks to their fancier interfaces and group messaging features may have outpaced the good old SMS, particularly where peer to peer messaging is concerned. However, the SMS continues to be the favourite and in fact has found a new lease of life in Application to Person (A2P), messaging with businesses lapping it up.

A study by the London based Juniper Research estimates that the A2P market will be worth almost $60 billion by 2018 up from just $55 billion in 2013. This growth is being seen across verticals led by the financial services sector.

Notwithstanding the fact that the use of OTT services by enterprises is on the rise, recent research by Juniper anticipates that operators will begin to roll out what they call Rich Communication Suite (RCS) combining the almost ubiquitous reach of SMS and the rich functionality of OTT applications. 

In fact, the research shows that SMS cannot be wished away, and OTT applications will create a new use case for A2P SMS traffic. In fact, this is already happening for financial services authentication apart from SMS emerging as the default fall back option against OTT applications.  

According to the Mobile Ecosystem Forum (MEF), more and more developers are using simple APIs in their apps to send messages to users while this further opens up the tantalizing prospect of ‘conversational commerce’ in which brands use bots to talk to customers as if they were human operators.

So much so, companies are embracing text across all available channels with 76% of consumers receiving communications from businesses such as banks, healthcare and retailers via SMS while 65% have engaged with companies via chat apps, it says.

The 2000s could be said to the heydays of the SM with operators turning the messaging system into a business and even charging a premium for it apart from rolling out location-based services for advertising and other alerts to consumers. With its 160-character limit the SMS provided immense options for experimenting and innovating on the message.   

The popularity and addictiveness of the SMS was such that the subject lent itself to much research into its usage and social impact thereof.

One study by survey firm Morning Consult of American respondents showed that interestingly women preferred to text while men would rather talk on the phone. An overwhelming 72% of the women surveyed said their preferred application was SMS compared to 53% of men who said they would rather use it. In contract more men (16%) seemed to prefer Facebook Messenger for P2P communication compared to women (15%). Preference for WhatsApp was the same among men and women with 2% of them identifying it as their tool of choice. 

All said and done, if research is to be believed it is perhaps too early to write off the SMS and it could yet have its day with people across the world continuing to use it thanks to its ease of use and almost 100% availability.