The life of SMS is amazing.
It went from state of the art technology, to the de facto communication channel for teens and youth, at least in Europe, to being obsolete in less than 25 years!
It went from state of the art technology, to the de facto communication channel for teens and youth, at least in Europe, to being obsolete in less than 25 years!
Many telecom operators also offers basically unlimited texts and calls for a fixed price which makes it often an easier way to communicate than to figure out what service person x is currently on. I use sms way more than I communicate on any other digital service. I would like for everyone to use Signal or something but so far I only have 1 contact there. And by using sms, at least I know it is not indexed and searched by an american company to sell me more ads. Also, I live in a country with large, pretty empty areas. In several of these locations the 3G/4G-networks are often unavailable but sending a simple sms works just fine.
Back in the 90s the telcos were completely caught off guard - this was signalling architecture meant for setup/teardown of calls and other bits and pieces.
Overnight a booming cottage industry in SMS Service Centres sprung up to offload all the additional traffic.