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A "Short" Message to the U.S. Telecom Industry
by Paul G Schreier, Contributing Editor

Sitting at the dinner table, I hear Morse Code coming out of my daughter's room: dit-dit-dit dah-dah dit-dit-dit. No, she's not a ham radio operator or anything of the sort; it's simply her cell phone alerting her to the fact that she's just received another SMS message. In fact, it's not unusual to hear that sequence of beeps on a train, on the street, or virtually anywhere in public. Here in Europe SMS has become a way of life—and people in the U.S. should get ready for the avalanche.

First, for those who don't recognize the term, SMS refers to Short Messaging Service, whereby somebody can send a message of at most 160 characters to another person's cell phone. You can create these messages directly on phone keypads—and kids especially are remarkably adept at thumb-only typing—or go to some Internet sites where you can type a message on your PC keyboard. Because of the character limit, though, a new text shorthand has arisen. CUL8R, for instance, means "See you later." When the recipient receives your SMS, the phone gives some sort of alert, and the default on many phones is the Morse Code for S – M – S.

Let's look at a few statistics. According to Telephia Inc, more than half of the overall U.S. population living in major metropolitan areas now owns a mobile phone and subscribes to a wireless service. On the other hand, another marketing firm (Zelos Group) says that almost all consumers, 98%, use their cell phones only to make calls.

Now consider the situation here in Europe. First, virtually everyone has their own cell phone, starting even with young teens. These days you'll even seen grandmothers plastering a "handy," as they're known, to their ears while strolling down the sidewalk. Whereas teens used to pass notes to each other at school, they now send SMSs. Laugh as you might, teens were the SMS early adopters who initially drove the market, and such teen-talk continues to make up an enormous portion of all SMSs being sent. When you realize that her carrier charges my daughter 0.25 Swiss Francs (about 17 cents) for each SMS she sends out, you can appreciate what a revenue stream this is becoming. Further, I've seen a report that on some days more than a billion (!) SMS messages are transmitted within Europe—and even at 17 cents each…well, you run the numbers.

This call volume will only grow as SMS goes mainstream, which is happening rapidly. You can now sign up to get news headlines, stock prices, real-time sports scores, weather reports, train and airline info, lottery results, and jokes. Newspapers are filled with ads for SMS horoscopes and similar services. I'm starting to see ads for erotic hotlines running over SMS (and let's admit it, porn is already a major financial engine behind the Internet). What content providers charge for their information varies widely, but even at a few pennies each, the volume of calls makes it an interesting business proposition. Last month, the German-language section of the pan-European broadcasting group RTL devoted an hour of prime time on a Saturday night to doing a type of contest to see how many SMS messages they could get viewers to send in. They were trying to set a world record—and they ended up doing so, getting well over 2 million messages.

 

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