Author: Zhao Xiaofei
IoT Think Tank Original
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Guide
It's been 29 years since the advent of text messaging, and in the past 29 years, the world's scientific and technological progress has changed rapidly, but sms, a seemingly inconspicuous tool, still plays an important role.
One day in December 1992, one of Vodafone's engineers sent the first text message in human history, which contained only 15 characters "MERRY CHRISTMAS", but it was a historic moment. Just a few days ago, the landmark text message was sold in the form of an NFT (non-homogeneous token) at August, The largest independent auction house in France, for 107,000 euros.
It's been 29 years since the advent of text messaging, and in the past 29 years, the world's scientific and technological progress has changed rapidly, but sms, a seemingly inconspicuous tool, still plays an important role. Entering the 5G era, SMS is upgrading to rich media communication (RCS), which is what we often call 5G news, and various industries are also highly looking forward to the changes brought about by 5G news.
A great initiative that enriched people's communication lives
The first human text message sent by Vodafone engineers in 1992 was a text message that could not be replied to, because under the technical conditions at that time, the portable phone that received it did not have the function of replying to the text message. At the same time, sending this text message is not so easy,
Without a keyboard and text messages not yet being sent from a mobile phone, Vodafone engineers improved the code to make the emerging method of communication between text and mobile phones over mobile communication networks a reality. The Vodafone engineer who sent the first text message did not expect that text messages would become so popular for many years to come.
In 1993, Nokia introduced a mobile phone capable of transmitting text messages. Since then, with the improvement of the GSM network and the increase in the number of mobile phones that support SMS, SMS has begun to become popular, especially in the case of high initial call costs, SMS has largely replaced the function of some calls.
Remember that when I was in college, most students just had the first mobile phone in their lives, but at that time, the mobile phone bill was high, and it was a two-way fee, which was not something that most students could afford, and text messaging became the core communication tool. At that time, Zhejiang Mobile launched a package of 10 yuan package of 1,000 text messages for campus student users, which was the star package of that era, and many students and friends in other provinces wanted to apply for a SIM card of Zhejiang Mobile through us to use this preferential SMS package. Those years were also a period of rapid growth of domestic SMS services, the most typical of which was that every year during the Spring Festival, operators would release the news that the number of New Year's SMS messages continued to break records.
In the first 10 years of this century, text messaging shined. According to the Statistics of the International Telecommunication Union, the number of global SMS transmissions reached 6.1 trillion in 2010, growing at a rate of 3 times in 3 years. However, with the maturity of 3G networks around the world and the rise of Internet OTT tools such as WhatsApp, Facebook, and WeChat, SMS has slowed down its growth.
Nowadays SMS has a low presence, but it throws in an important role
Nowadays, we are used to using WeChat for communication, which basically erodes the space of personal peer-to-peer text messaging, and to some extent has caused an impact on voice calls. Nowadays, individuals rarely communicate by sending text messages, which seem to have a very low presence in our daily communications. In fact, text messages not only have not withdrawn from the stage of history, but also serve us in another way, playing an irreplaceable role in our daily lives.
In China, the changes in SMS services can be reflected to a certain extent by the following data:
Changes in domestic SMS traffic volume (unit: 100 million, source: Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Internet of Things think tank mapping)
According to data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, in 2000, China's SMS sending volume exceeded 1 billion for the first time, while in 2001 it reached 18.9 billion, in 2002 it reached nearly 100 billion, and the next 10 years were the highlight of SMS, reaching a peak of 897.3 billion in 2012. After 2012, under the impact of WeChat, the number of SMS sent continued to decline, falling to the bottom of 664.4 billion in 2017. However, since 2018, the volume of SMS services has begun to grow rapidly, and the annual SMS traffic in 2020 has ushered in a record high of more than 1.2 trillion. According to the data of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the annual revenue of SMS business in 2020 will exceed 40 billion yuan.
Taking China Mobile as an example, according to the data disclosed in China Mobile's prospectus, the volume and revenue of SMS services in recent years are as follows:
China Mobile SMS business volume and revenue (Source: China Mobile Prospectus)
In the past few years, China Mobile's SMS business volume and revenue have basically shown an upward trend, and in 2020, the SMS business volume reached 958.3 billion pieces, and the scale of revenue was 29.22 billion yuan, and many SMS messages that the public had been unfamiliar with brought nearly 30 billion yuan of annual revenue to China Mobile.
As can be seen from the above data, since 2018, the SMS service has been revitalized. Although the impact of WeChat on SMS services is very obvious, the impact is more on the number of personal peer-to-peer SMS, which accounts for a smaller and smaller proportion of total SMS, while the proportion of industry SMS is rising rapidly. With the acceleration of online business in various industries, the demand for business reminders, customer service services, logins and identity verification has accelerated, forming a large-scale demand for SMS.
It can be said that Internet applications tend to die out of personal SMS, but the demand for SMS for the services provided by Internet applications itself is rising rapidly, which is the new form of SMS services. For example, of China Mobile's 29.22 billion yuan of SMS revenue in 2020, the group's SMS revenue from enterprises in various industries was 25.2 billion yuan.
How much demand for SMS for various industry services can be seen from a set of data. According to the data released by the China Communications Enterprise Association, in September 2021, the volume of SMS sent by banks ranked first, accounting for 55.1% of all SMS sending volume, and according to the size of the sending scale, it was china construction bank, industrial and commercial bank, bank of China and postal savings bank and other enterprises, of which the amount of sms sent by china construction bank in September was about 5.32 billion, and the industrial and commercial bank of china was about 3.50 billion; the industry with the second largest number of text messages sent was telecom operators, accounting for about 26.47%, mainly traffic reminders, customer service, etc Among Internet platform enterprises, Tencent sent about 1.94 billion SMS messages in September, Taobao about 1.54 billion, and JD.com about 1.50 billion.
SMS and the Internet of Things: an important means of communication for the cellular Internet of Things
A fraction of the hundreds of billions of text messages that operators send each year are closely tied to the Internet of Things, especially IoT applications that use cellular network communications.
As early as the beginning of this century, operators began to provide IoT services for users in various industries, called M2M services, that is, machine-to-machine communication services. Taking China Mobile as an example, in 2002, China Mobile launched the heavy steel monitoring business, began to explore the Internet of Things business, and then provided channel business in projects such as Lucky Lotto betting machines and water affairs. In the early M2M service, SMS was the key data transmission channel, and later data transmission was realized through the GPRS function.
When the author participated in the Xinjiang Mobile M2M consultation ten years ago, a large number of Internet of Things services in Xinjiang, such as power meter collection and reading, wireless drip irrigation, and car service, all used SMS to collect information or send control instructions, and the connection scale has reached more than 100,000 nodes, which can be seen the importance of SMS for the Internet of Things business.
China Mobile has launched a series of enterprise standards for M2M business specifications, which have unified specifications for business characteristics, technical requirements, application interfaces, business processes, code number management, billing rules, etc., of which SMS service occupies an important position in the M2M service classification. In the period when 2G networks dominated, SMS has strongly supported the development of operators' cellular Internet of Things services.
Even in the current IoT solutions based on data services such as 4G and NB-IoT, SMS still plays an irreplaceable role, especially in the management and configuration between the IoT platform and the terminal and the IoT card.
Taking China Telecom as an example, its Internet of Things product system has a special product of "Winglink SMS", the service content of which is "to provide point-to-multipoint SMS service between the Internet of Things customer platform and the Internet of Things device, to achieve remote wake-up, upgrade, start-up, parameter modification and other functions of customer terminals". It can be seen that SMS is still an important way to interact between the IoT platform and the IoT terminal.
SMS upgrade version, 5G message debut
In the 5G era, 5G messaging is highly anticipated and is considered a new upgrade of SMS. In April 2020, the three major operators jointly released the "5G News White Paper", which depicts the broad future scenario of 5G news. In the past year or so, 5G messaging has achieved breakthroughs in various aspects such as industry standards, platform construction, terminal support, and industrial ecology, such as the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology recently officially approved industry standards such as "5G Messaging Overall Technical Requirements", "5G Messaging Terminal Test Methods", "5G Messaging Terminal Technical Requirements", and more than 100 terminal models supporting GSMA UP2.4.
Corresponding to industry SMS, 5G messaging also has the form of A2P, that is, the type of message that interacts between industry customers and individual users, and its positioning is a "super APP" that integrates OTT and APP functions. For enterprise customers, the openness, strong security, wide reach and high credibility of 5G messages provide efficient closed-loop application scenarios for industry customers, greatly reducing the total cost of transactions and making the application of governments and enterprises more efficient.
For IoT applications, 5G messaging may be able to further optimize various apps in previous IoT applications, forming an interaction between rich media messages and IoT terminals and applications. The author has written in "Xiaomi/Huawei/OPPO... Can 5G messaging be used as a main line in the layout of the Internet of Things? The middle level of the article has discussed that for mobile phone manufacturers and some intelligent hardware suppliers with certain strength, 5G messages may be used as a main line of their Internet of Things layout, which can further increase their Internet of Things ecological cohesion, especially the mobile phone as the internet of things entrance or total control of the scene, 5G messages may be able to form an "entrance to the entrance".
At present, from the perspective of the caliber of the three major operators, 5G news is on the eve of full commercial use, and various forms of rich media have revitalized the ancient SMS and may be able to become another new source of income and ecological gripper for operators.
In 1992, Vodafone engineers sent the first text message to mankind with the content of "Merry Christmas", a text message worth 100,000 euros that was epoch-making and changed our lives in many ways.
Today, it happens to be Christmas Day, and I wish the readers of the Internet of Things think tank a Merry Christmas!