Many Limitions of SMS

SMS was to use this telephony-optimized system, and to transport messages on the signaling paths needed to control the telephony traffic during time periods when no signaling traffic existed. In this way, unused resources in the system could be used to transport messages at minimal cost. Its network reach – a property that has taken decades of carrier federation to achieve – are an incredibly valuable asset and a difficult one for a competitor to achieve. The SMS alternatives need to address the gaps – which are many – but also overcome the network effects challenge of competing with SMS.SMS is essentially similar to paging, but SMS messages do not require the mobile phone to be active and within range, as they will be held for a number of days until the phone is active and within range. SMS messages are transmitted within the same cell or to anyone with roaming capability. Messages may be transmitted using an SMS gateway which is a web site that lets one enter an SMS message to someone within the cell served by that gateway or acts as an international gateway for users with roaming capability. There are various limitations of SMS:

Multi-Device: SMS service is bound to a mobile phone number, and mobile phone numbers are bound to a single device. Today’s users have multiple devices from which they’d like to communicate – tablets, iPods, laptops, and desktop computers. This gap is becoming increasingly obvious as Internet services become more cloud centric – allowing users to seamlessly move between devices without loss of functionality. Many of the SMS alternative applications offer this capability.

Cost: SMS are expensive, though pricing varies. Compare this to using the data channel, which comes to .000003 cents/byte – over 47 thousand times cheaper per byte compared to SMS.

Real-Time: SMS is fire-and-forget. There are no guarantees on delivery time, and delivery can take a long time. There are no tools that help users have a more interactive, real-time conversation. Most instant messaging applications support the familiar “is typing” indicator. This indicator makes the conversation more real time by letting one user know that the other is typing a response. This feature is absent in SMS. IMessage, for example, addresses this gap by providing is-typing indicators when sending an iMessage between iOS users. It also provides faster delivery.

Groups: SMS is one-to-one. There is no notion of groups – the ability to send a message to a group of users, and for the participants to reply, and for the reply to go to everyone as well. A group feature would also allow users to know the other participants in the group. Groups are a fundamental part of any social interaction. If the role of chat or texting or calling is to virtualize a real-world interaction, people interact in groups all the time. Most of our most social real-life interactions are group-based – parties, dinner with friends, watching a movie together.

Rich Text: SMS is text only, limited to 160 7-bit characters. There is limited support for long messages, and no support for advanced text, embedded images, emoticons, or multimedia content. Some of these limitations have been addressed by MMS, though MMS is a separate service and has less uptake than SMS. Rich text features have been supported by most chat applications for years.

A message consisting of more than this number of characters is simply split up into more than one message. If the recipient has a "long message" feature on his cell phone, the cell phone will join the messages and display them as one. Otherwise, they are received as separate texts.All mobile subscribers can now send unlimited number of messages to any mobile phone. Till now subscribers were to send only 200 SMSes per day . As this SMS limit gave birth to the different new ways of sending SMS through Internet making serious security concerns TRAI now has waived all the mobile phone users from previous SMS limit.