FYI,General Information on SMS: Culled from Wireless Business and Technology. By Bill Ray-------------------------------------------------Short Message Service (SMS) has been the unpredicted golden goose of mobile telephone networks, with more than a billion messages flying through the airwaves every month over the GSM network alone. Even at a few cents a message it's not difficult to see how SMS might be the solution to the growing debt problem faced by companies that massively overbid for 3G licenses... at least until 3G starts to make some money. MS messages don't tend to overload the network. Being non-time critical means that delays during peak times can be tolerated. While a network may regret a campaign to get users to make more voice calls, more SMS messages generally mean just more revenue, something most mobile operators are in desperate need of. But in addition to the general "I'm on my way home" and "I'll be in the pub in half an hour" type messages, a new generation of services is about to proliferate, offering everything from music to theater tickets, all encapsulated within 160 alphanumeric characters (the limit of SMS). Users send messages on their handsets, originally entering each character by pressing a key repeatedly (so pressing button 2 once gets you an "a" while pressing it twice gets you a "b"). Predictive text entry, now the norm, allows you to press each button once while the phone tries to guess the word you want from its internal dictionary. Thus, pressing 4 twice gets you "hi" as that is the only two-letter word made up from the letters on the 4 key (g, h, and i). This produces some interesting bias in the words included in the phones (Spock is there, as is Klingon, but Sulu and Uhura are strangely absent), but has massively increased both the number of messages and their complexity.
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