Sending written messages, a service launched in Portugal 27 years ago, is on the decline, but SMS remains “a secure form” of authentication used in the banking sector, for example, a telecommunications specialist told Lusa.
“SMS remains the most secure way for many phone applications (apps) to be authenticated or identified. For example, banking apps send security or certification SMS to mobile phones to authenticate and approve many banking transactions,” emphasized Nuno Taveira, who is responsible for more than 25 years with Vodafone, in Portugal, the United Kingdom, Spain and Italy.
This written messaging service is still used in the banking industry to verify access to accounts, for instance to prevent fraud or cyber-attacks, this former SMS product manager and messaging platform explained to agency Lusa, a role he fulfilled when SMS first appeared in Portugal in October 1995.
The world’s first SMS (Short Message Service) was sent 30 years ago, on December 3, 1992, by Briton Neil Papworth, a telecommunications engineer at Sema Group Telecoms, in the United Kingdom. The message, a “Merry Christmas” wish, was sent from Neil Papworth’s computer to Vodafone’s Orbitel 901 mobile phone owned by Richard Jarvis.
In Portugal, TMN (currently MEO) and Telecel (currently Vodafone) were active in 1995, the latter where Nuno Taveira worked.
“There are services that have gone down in history during the implementation phase of mobile phones in Portugal. (…) The text messaging service (SMS) was first launched in Portugal, in October 1995, by Telecel for contract (those that were not prepaid ) that made up a small percentage of the customer base,” he said.
Then, in 1996, Telecel launched “Vitamins”, the first being “Vitamina T”, Telecel’s first fully prepaid service. And it also launched the TeleMultibanco service, where the customer could access his bank accounts, check balances, recharge his “Vitamins”, make bank transfers using this banking service supported by SMS, he stressed.
In September 1999, Telecel’s SMS also became available to “Vitamin” customers, “because it was one of the first prepaid services in the world by all mobile operators, and the first in Portugal with this functionality,” he stressed.
“The availability of SMS in prepaid Vitamina, resulted in the first major ‘boom’ in the use of this service, as Telecel led in several segments and in the youngest (YORN) we were undisputed leaders in the Portuguese market. Young people, but it business segment also liked to use SMS as a means and form of communication,” he added, explaining that the service was not only efficient but also cheaper than the voice call.
Nuno Taveira, currently an investor and advisor to the board of directors of CENTUM Research & Technology.
I still remember February 2000, when the three mobile operators at the time — Telecel, TMN and Optimus (now NOS) — made the use of SMS available between their networks.
“As a result, there was a second major ‘boom’, with almost exponential growth in the use of SMS among the three mobile operators then in existence. Written messages, as the sending centers were somewhat limited in their ability to process them all at the same time At the time, we could process about 1,000 text messages per second,” he emphasizes.
Nuno Taveira also remembered Christmas nights or New Year’s Eve when consecutive records of text messages sent were broken.
“SMS contacted many more people at the same time rather than calling each of each customer’s preferred contacts, and it was much cheaper,” he stressed.
In a phase of massive SMS adoption, which was about “meeting the needs of growing and more demanding customers”, Nuno Taveira emphasized that he felt “improve people’s quality of life, increase the productivity of companies, contribute developing the information and knowledge society and creating value for Portugal”.
The first data available from ANACOM dates back to 2000, when the number of SMS messages totaled 550 million, or about seven SMS messages per active user per month.
The peak of SMS traffic was reached in 2012, when each effective user sent 180 messages per month, totaling 27,860,126 messages.
Still according to ANACOM data, this number is decreasing. In 2021, 68 text messages were sent per effective user per month (-62% compared to 2012), a total of 10,729,392.
For Nuno Taveira, the decline between 2010 and 2020 is due to “the emergence of new Rich Communication Services (RCS) communication platforms that are better known today, such as WhatsApp or Messenger. This technology combines text with images, sounds, documents or the popular GIFs .
“However, it remains a service with a high level of use, especially in less developed economies or where mobile data services are still accessible to a small percentage of the population,” assures Nuno Taveira, who was also director of Western Europe after Vodafone, Australia and New Zeeland for Oppo.
Source: DN
