Yesterday marks 28 years since the world's first short message service – or the SMS – was sent with a message that simply read “Merry Christmas".
On 3 December 1992, the first SMS was sent via Vodafone UK's GSM network by computer programmer Neil Papworth.
A test engineer, he sent the message as an experiment from his PC to his friend and Vodafone employee Richard Jarvis's phone.
Since then, the history of text messages has evolved to include Rich Communication Suite (RCS) messaging, social media and instant messaging, which have each transformed the world.
SMS has also become a popular marketing tool and continues to be a communications channel used by financial, health and public sector organisations.
It’s estimated that more than five billion people across the globe can send and receive text messages, to date.
A study by Juniper Research indicates global mobile business messaging traffic will increase by 10% by year-end to 2.7 trillion, up from 2.5 trillion in 2019. The mobile business messaging market comprises three main messaging protocols, namely SMS, RCS and over-the-top messaging applications.
