Short Message Service (SMS) is a text messaging service component of phone, web, or mobile communication systems, using standardized communications protocols that allow the exchange of short text messages between fixed line or mobile phone devices.
SMS text messaging is the most widely used data application in the world, with 3.6 billion active users, or 78% of all mobile phone subscribers. The term "SMS" is used as a synonym for all types of short text messaging, as well as the user activity itself, in many parts of the world. SMS is also being used as a form of direct marketing known as SMS marketing.
SMS as used on modern handsets originated from radio telegraphy in radio memo pagers using standardized phone protocols and later defined as part of the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) series of standards in 1985 as a means of sending messages of up to 160 characters, to and from GSM mobile handsets. Since then, support for the service has expanded to include other mobile technologies such as ANSI CDMA networks and Digital AMPS, as well as satellite and Landline networks. Most SMS messages are mobile-to-mobile text messages, although the standard supports other types of broadcast messaging as well.
Famous quotes containing the words short, message and/or service:
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“Television does not dominate or insist, as movies do. It is not sensational, but taken for granted. Insistence would destroy it, for its message is so dire that it relies on being the background drone that counters silence. For most of us, it is something turned on and off as we would the light. It is a service, not a luxury or a thing of choice.”
—David Thomson, U.S. film historian. America in the Dark: The Impact of Hollywood Films on American Culture, ch. 8, William Morrow (1977)
“Let not the tie be mercenary, though the service is measured in money. Make yourself necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to any.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)