SMS: Finding Its Own Voice

SMS is taking off in India too. In Delhi alone, private services AirTel and Essar handled more than 1.5 million SMS messages, as on January 1, 2001

With the growing usage and popularity of this service, are there

possibilities of operators pulling the rugout from under their own feet? No way,

says Sudershan Banerji, CEO, Essar Cellphone. "SMS is a short messaging

service meant to inform little developments and is in fact, a fun activity. The

voice service will always prevail in a scenario which requires instant reaction.

Both services have their own place." SMS services have intruded he admits,

but only into the space of paging and e-mail services.

However, Vijay Gupta, network planning manager, AirTel, differs, "There

is definitely some impact on revenue generation when we have to allocate more

lines to SMS, specially during peak hours." Each voice line is allocated to

service eight SMS servicing lines. There are different servers hosting the

services for SMS services. As such, there is no network interference between

voice calls and SMS messaging. However, the fact remains that allocation of

lines for SMS services is done from the existing lines in the network.

Therefore, more the traffic in SMS messaging, more the lines being allocated to

the service. According to Gupta, there is constant monitoring of the network and

depending on the traffic, the configuration of the network is done on a dynamic

basis.

So what is it that makes SMS so popular? Says Banerjee, "The major

reason for SMS being so popular is its unobtrusive nature. It ensures complete

privacy of the sender and the receiver. So, irrespective of the environment of

the receiver, there is no inconvenience to the receiver." Adds Atul Jhamb,

vice president, AirTel, "The most obvious reason why SMS clicks with users

is because it’s economical. Youngsters and business people can now communicate

economically at a fraction of the earlier cost. We generate up to 7% of our

revenue from text messaging." Essar puts the figure at 10—15% from its

text-based service. And this is a global trend. Analysts predict that within

three years, mobile telecom operators will be sending up to 100 billion short

messages per month, a 170% annual increase over current levels. At this rate,

the average mobile phone users will receive three SMS messages every day.

SMS is a funky way of communication and has brought about a new language

paradigm altogether. Typing on a cellphone can become cumbersome, so necessarily

there are short cuts to messages similar to emoticons in e-mails. Therefore GAL

in SMS is not the American slang for girl but "get a life". And PCM is

"please call me", and CID is "consider it done". Just

consider this: "Wan2tlk"–a 96-page guide to 10,000 abbreviations–is

a best seller now, beating the current favorite Harry Potter to the top slot!

Balaka Baruah Aggarwal



Cyber News Services, New Delhi