Monday, January 13, 2003		Guest Speak

Generation Text
Rajiv Sethi

FUTURE generations unlocking a time capsule full of a day’s worth of our million SMS messages would gain immediate feel of our lifestyle. Creative textographics with dating rituals and individuals’ unedited personal feelings will probably tell them all about our life’s events. After all, things that were once said with flowers are now, acceptably, conveyed within 160 characters, in an SMS. Generation Text, as I like to call them, are conveying everything from proposing-by-SMS to robbery-by-SMS!

SMS was first created as part of GSM Phase 1 standard in the early nineties. The first SMS message ever sent was in UK on December 1992 from a PC to a mobile over the Vodafone GSM network. Since the initial launch, SMS has steadily grown before experiencing a huge increase during this year. This pattern has been reflected around the world, as individual markets achieve mass penetration, fuelled by the popularity of GSM prepaid subscriptions.

Industry analysts estimate that the total number of SMS messages sent worldwide will rise from 104 billion in Q1 2002 to 329 billion in Q2 2003. Twelve billion text messages are sent worldwide each month to PCs, PDAs and mobile phones and pagers add another 3 billion text messages each month. In India, recent estimates put SMS traffic at 70 lakh a day nationwide-up from 30 lakh a day in early 2001. This should go up to 10,000,000 messages a day by Q2 2003. The figure indicates a huge increase in the volume of text messages generated every month by GSM wireless customers.

An increase in the volume, value, variety and flexibility of services for consumers has contributed to the growth. SMS has become an integral part of people’s lives — business and personal. The holiday season like Divali saw a peak in SMS messaging in India this year. As much as 65 lakh SMS messages were sent out in Delhi alone on Divali.