What is SMS? What is SMS?

SMS is the first short message service, and is now the highest penetration of a short message service, through which mobile phones can send and receive messages between each other, content in text, digital or binary text-based data, currently, the length of this short message is limited to 140 bytes. SMS is welcomed by the public for its simple and convenient use, but it is always the first generation wireless data service, which has the limitation of technical standard in content and application.

SMS Features

An SMS message can be up to 160 characters long (even binary).

SMS is a storage and forwarding service. That is, short messages are not sent directly from the sender to the recipient, but are always forwarded through the SMS Center. If the recipient is in an disconnected state (possibly the phone is turned off), the message is sent when the receiver connects again.

SMS has the ability to send acknowledgement of messages. This means that SMS differs from paging by not simply sending a short message and believing that the message has been sent successfully, but rather that the short message sender can receive a return message informing them whether the short message has been sent successfully.

SMS messages can be sent and received synchronously with GSM voice.

SMS messages are charged for messages, and are therefore much more expensive (per byte) than data sent over ip-based networks (for example, using gprs[Universal Packet Radio services).

To use SMS, users need to subscribe to a mobile network that supports SMS and must enable the use of SMS for that user. Users need to have destinations that send short messages or receive short messages. The destination is usually another mobile phone, but it can also be a server. Finally, users need to have mobile phones that support SMS and need to know how to send or read short messages using their specific models of mobile phones.