Mobile Network Comparison

Text messaging is all grown up! This month, SMS text messaging turns 20. It’s hard to remember a world without mobile text messaging any more, but the first text was sent only back in 1992. Neil Papworth sent an early Christmas text to Richard Jarvis, a Technical Director of Vodafone on the 3rd December.

Of course, text messaging didn’t become popular in the mainstream for several years after that. For one thing, mobile phones weren’t yet capable of even sending texts, only receiving them. Still, texting, properly called Short Message Service or SMS for short(!), is responsible for a lot over the years. Nowadays we have the advent of sexting but no doubt SMS has saved many lives and ended many relationships. Today there are an astounding 3.6 billion users.

The invention of the text

The idea of adding textual messaging features to mobile phones was first conceived in the early 1980s. It was quite a technical achievement to work out how to send textual data over a network optimised for voice calls. In the end, it was worked out that texts could be transmitted by utilising the same signalling paths used to control voice traffic when they were not in use.

The early development was carried out in the early GSM organisation pioneered in France and Germany. Early proposals revolved around setting a global standard so that all international networks could use the same technology. The initial proposals were approved by the GSM group by 1985.

The first texts

Neil Papworth’s first-ever text was pretty swiftly followed by commercial implementations. Sweden was the first couple to get a Short Message Service Centre allowing the sending and receiving of text messages and it was swiftly followed by BT Cellnet (O₂) in 1993. Nokia was a pioneer in producing mobile phones capable of sending text messages as well as receiving them.

At first, texting took a while to catch on. In 1995 the average customer sent a text message less frequently than once every 2 months. This wasn’t helped by the fact it took until 1999 for UK networks to allow users to send texts to people on other networks. However, by the end of the next year, texting had exploded. The average number texts per customer was now more than 1 every day and over 200 million SMS messages were sent in the UK on one day in 2006.

Technicalities and growth

Around the rest of the world, texting continued to grow in popularity. It had already grown from 17 billion to 250 billion in the year up to 2001. The next milestone was the 1 trillion mark which was hit back in 2005. The same year, SMS texting was worth about £50 billion. That’s more than the entire GDP of Croatia!

The US did lag behind a lot. In 2005 there were fewer than 10 billion texts sent per month. However, they soon caught up with the rest of the world and by 2008 that figure had multiplied many times – there were about 840 billion texts sent over the year.

One curiosity about texting is the character limit. This is a technical limitation that originates from the first genesis of SMS. Originally messages were limited to 128 bytes with each byte encoding one character. Later on, this was increased to 140 bytes meaning that each text could have 140 characters in it. The restriction, combined with awkward numerical keypads, led to ever more creative ways to fit information into the low character limit. Soon “txt speak” was born and school children soon gained expertise in writing in this dialect quickly and deciphering the 21st century shorthand.

How then did we get to 160 characters today? Well, they stripped some of the possible characters out meaning that it then only required 7 bits to encode each character. This is opposed to the 8 bits required normally. As 140 bytes is equal to 1120 bits, that allows for exactly 160 characters.

Another advance has been the ability to concatenate multi-part messages. So now it’s easy to send long messages spread over several SMS texts. They are automatically joined when received.

Nowadays texts are a firm part of modern day life. Ofcom claims that SMS is the most common method of communication. We’re more likely to text family and friends on a daily basis than get in touch by any other means. And almost 60% of UK adults text at least once a day. (As an aside, check out this amazing research that shows how hackers can read your texts and passwords by reconstructing your smartphone keypresses from reflections in your glasses).

Do you remember when you sent your first text? How has your text message usage changed over the years? How many texts do you send a month now? And do you see a future for SMS text messaging in the age of the smartphone and unlimited data?

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We’ve just published out newest mobile phone network review: Green Mobile. Please check it out and let us know what you think.

We hope to look into Green Mobile some more in the near future so if you have any questions you’d like us to put to them. Please let us know.

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An Australian police department has warned that the error-ridden Maps software provided with the latest iPhones is potentially “life-threatening”. The warnings come after at least four people have found themselves stranded in completely inhospitable conditions due to errors in the navigation software on Apple’s flagship iPhone. iOS 6 users have ended up stranded miles away from habitation in the Australian outback as the sweltering summer approaches.

The police department from a small town called Mildura posted an official warning to motorists requesting that they don’t use Apple’s Maps software when driving to the town. It turns out that drivers coming from Adelaide in the West had been led to completely the wrong place trying to find the town.

Instead of coming to the metropolis of 30,000 people, they ended up completely lost at a location over 50 miles away where the Maps app erroneously placed the town. The incorrect location was in the middle of Australia’s second-largest National Park in Sunset country and being stuck without adequate liquids, shelter and supplies can be incredibly dangerous in the barren wilderness. Locals said that there is no water to be found and at temperatures can easily reach 46°C.

One man recently had to be rescued was trapped for over 24 hours in the National Park. An additional problem is that there is limited mobile phone reception as the area is so vast and people might have to walk some distance to get in contact with the outside world. As temperatures are rising toward the peak of the Australian summer, increasing concerns prompted the police departments to issue the official warning.

This is not the first time that inaccuracies and errors in the latest version of Apple’s iOS 6 Maps software has caused headlines. We first reported on the numerous mistakes back when it was first released. Apple decided to remove the ability of iPhone owners to use Google’s map software and instead force them to use their own. However, until now it’s been more of a humorous curiosity or annoying inconvenience rather than something truly dangerous. Apple had to move quickly to update the maps to fix this particular error and avoid any more serious incidents in Australia.

Since the ill-fated launch of the error-ridden Apple Maps app, there’s been much embarrassment for the American firm. A number of senior management is were fired including the head software group Scott Forstall. Even worse, Chief executive Tim Cook had to climb down an issue a humiliating public apology for the many errors and mistakes.

So much for a new iPhone killer – it seems that Apple Maps is making it more of a Killer iPhone 🙂

What do you think? Do people rely too much on technology these days to the expense of common sense? Is this merely a case for having a backup paper atlas? And do you think that Apple has taken too long to sort out the errors in the latest version of Maps?

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