About SMS???

The technical development of SMS was a multi-national collaboration supporting the framework of standards bodies and through these organisations made the technology freely available to the whole world. This is described and supported by evidence in the following sections.[8]

The first proposal for SMS which initiated the development of SMS in the group GSM was made by a contribution of Germany and France into the GSM meeting in February 1985 in Oslo[9]. This proposal was further elaborated in GSM subgroup WP1 Services (Chairman Martine Alvernhe, France Telecom) based on a contribution from Germany. There were also initial discussions in the subgroup WP3 network aspects chaired by Jan Audestad (Telenor). The result was approved by the main group GSM in a document of June 85 which was distributed to industry.[10] The input documents on SMS had been prepared by Friedhelm Hillebrand (Deutsche Telekom) with contributions from Bernard Ghillebaert (France Télécom).

SMS was considered in the main GSM group as a possible service for the new digital cellular system. In GSM document "Services and Facilities to be provided in the GSM System",[1] both mobile originated and mobile terminated short messages appear on the table of GSM teleservices.

Initial growth was slow, with customers in 1995 sending on average only 0.4 messages per GSM customer per month.[23] One factor in the slow takeup of SMS was that operators were slow to set up charging systems, especially for prepaid subscribers, and eliminate billing fraud which was possible by changing SMSC settings on individual handsets to use the SMSCs of other operators