SMS, which stands for Short Message System, was born. Instead of wasting that bandwidth, Hillebrand got the idea of using it to allow users to send short text messages to each other. (They also were the size of bricks and cost thousands of dollars.) Then, a German electronics whiz named Friedhelm Hillebrand realized that in addition to the radio channels upon which mobile phone networks relied to send out voice signals, there were also second channels that were largely unused, except to send some technical instructions to mobile phones about things such as reception strength. If you're a Millennial generation member accustomed to using that ubiquitous gadget in your pocket to buy sneakers, watch movies and play Angry Birds, it may come as a shock to discover that when mobile phones first became widely available in the 1980s, they were initially intended just for - gasp! - talking. To understand how free-texting apps work, you first have to understand how phones send and receive text messages in the first place. But you may be wondering: How do they afford to let you send texts for free? Is it even legal? And is there some hidden catch to what seems like a something-for-nothing deal? įree-texting seems like a no-brainer for phone users - so much so, in fact, that mobile phone service companies have been wailing and gnashing their teeth about the ruinous competition, and they're even contemplating giving up on the old charge-per-usage plans that have long have been an industry cash cow. One such app, Pinger, has become so popular that it handles more than two billion messages a month, and its eponymous San Jose, Calif.-based corporate parent has become the seventh biggest data carrier in the nation. Today, if you have an Internet-connected smartphone, you can take advantage of a growing assortment of downloadable apps that allow you to send and receive messages without incurring carrier charges, usually by bypassing the carrier's SMS system and sending messages through the Internet. Or rather, that's what you have to pay if you don't have a "free-texting" app. In an age when most other popular forms of electronic communication - e-mail, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, instant messaging apps, the video-chat service Skype - are available for free, mobile phone carriers still charge for texting, sometimes as much as 20 cents per message you send or receive. But that story is a reminder of the downside of SMS texting, which Americans love so much that they now send and receive more texts than the number of minutes they spend talking, according to a 2011 Nielsen survey. įortunately for him, the company agreed to tear up his bill. It was great fun, until one of the pair was shocked to receive a bill from his mobile carrier for $26,300. "A lot of times it was 'hey what's up,' 'how are you doing,' 'what's up,' 'hahaha,' 'lol,' over and over again," one of the men later explained to ABC News. In the course of a month, they thumbed their phones energetically, transmitting an astonishing 217,000 texts. Back in 2009, on a lark, two friends in Pennsylvania decided to try to set a world record for sending the most Short Message Service ( SMS) text messages.
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