User:David daumec MGCR331

Number :260323933 David Daumec   Student in Tuesday evening class mgcr-331  Fall 2008 The technology of mobility: SMS ,MMS and Message-based services

In the beginning of times the way to communicate was by bird  when you needed to send a message to somebody you sent it with a bird .the process was to write your note on a piece of paper, put it in the bird leg and let it fly away. With evolution of man kind new technology started to appear like the ‘’telegram’’ with who we started to send messages. There was also the traditional mailman. In certain country where technology doesn’t allow it there was by a carrier who would travel long distances to deliver the goods. In each of those ways, with the consistent evolution of humanity there is always the need to get messages the faster way possible.

One of humanities latest attempt  to accelerate the way we communicate   between each other has been the SMS (Short message service).But what is a SMS? It is a mechanism of delivery of short messages over the mobile networks ,fax machine and ip addresses .Each short message can not  be longer than 160 characters ,witch can be text (alphanumeric) or binary numbers  .But contrary to popular belief SMS first appeared in 1991, in GMS network and than later appeared in  CDMA and TDNA network IT became available to non GMS user in 2000.This way of message delivery became very popular with mobile users  because of his  similarity  to  “chatting’’( like with msn messenger by example). But instead of sending your SMS to some email address it was to a phone number .The convenience was you can send any memo (no graphic ,no image ) anytime and anywhere you bring your cell phone. SMS uses the control channel (rather than the voice channel), a unique feature of SMS is that the user can receive a SMS whether or not a call is in progress - the phone need only be turned on. If the phone is not turned on, the SMS will wait until the phone is turned on to send the message. One of the advantages of SMS, it provides a convenient, low-cost mechanism for non-voice communication. For The mobiles  company it provided a new way to make profit  , they saw new wave of interest toward text messaging so the started to adapt their phone to the new trend. Making new model of phones, inserting  a keyboard to the mobile. By adding new features to mobile ,like camera to takes pictures or videos .They created a new need because you could t send picture and videos with  the SMS technology, doesn’t support those  function .It started to become dilemma to the users : “ how to send picture videos via mobile network”. The fallow up of SMS finally arrived a new communication technology named MMS (Multimedia message service) developed by 3GPP (Third Generation Partnership Project). MMS provides to the users of mobile network the ability to  send Text messages ( with formatted with fonts, colors ), Images (JPEG, GIF format), Audio (MP3, MIDI), Video (MPEG).With this new wave of application who works particularly  like SMS but an MMS message has no size limit and could be many Kbytes in size, or even larger. One of the inconvenience is with the need of the company to advertize their products ,some of them started sending publicity via SMS or MMS to network subscribers, enquirers or customers .In the near future if we don’t regulate the publicity messages we could get spam who has some fraudulent interest. Another debate is the cost; the way that company charges those messages is different with every provider. Since were already paying for the SMS or MMS that they were only sending, the company started thinking about how to get more money .So certain mobile network like Bell wanted to charge costumers for the messages they would received in their mobile witch would make them millions of profit per month .But the dilemma was you never know when you will receive a message so why pay if you didn’t ask to receive one. So government had to tell those mobile company to restrain them self of charging people for them receive messages. We live in the fast life days, everything has to be fast right now or the fastest way possible and that the messages bases service ain t exempted but no matter how was SMS or MMS can be it doesn’t beat the simple way of sending a letter is more precious than a simple text message, email just because it has more meaning to it.

References:

http://www.wirelessdevnet.com/channels/sms/features/sms.html

http://www.mobile-phones-uk.org.uk/mms.htm

http://searchmobilecomputing.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid40_gci943702,00.html