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SMS Messaging To Foreign
Countries Coming Next Year
Good news for lovers of SMS -
Short Message Service - the text
messaging service offered by
cellular telephones. At least
for users connected to the GSM
network.
The Instituto Costarricense de
Electricidad (ICE) says that by
the early next year, SMS
messages can be sent outside of
Costa Rica. Currently, SMS text
messaging is only permitted
within the ICE network,
according to José Odio, head of
Roaming at ICE and Orlando
Cascante, director of Mobile
Services.
However, users of TDMA will be
out of luck. as the new service
will only be available on the
GSM networks (both new and old).
To activate the system, ICE
needs to first enter into
reciprocating agreements with
other cellular networks around
the world.
Cascante says that the
agreements will enable the
receiving telephone company to
bill ICE for the message and in
turn ICE billing its customer.
Though no cost was announced,
Cascante hinted that it would
cost around ¢16 colones
(us$0.03) for each message. To
send a text message within Costa
Rica, the cost is current ¢1.5
colones.
Cascante said that before the
service can be available, and
once all the agreements are in
place, there will be a testing
phase and time needed to get the
necessary approval by the
Autoridad Reguladora de los
Servicios Público (Aresep_ - the
regulating authority on public
prices and services.
The countries with priority for
the SMS messaging will be the
United States, Canada, Central
America and Europe, according to
the director.
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We need your help. For more than
8 hours the GSM network in the
areas of Plaza Mayor (Rohrmoser/Pavas)
- though could have been
nationwide - did not work. No
signal was available, and when a
signal was obtained, the network
would not permit calls. All
incoming calls were immediately
transferred to VoiceMail.
ICE says that there was no
problem with the towers nor any
repairs were being made on the
network.
If you have a similar problem,
please send us an
email. We would like
to hear from you. Also, for
those using the new GSM network,
let us know what you think of
the system.
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The inventor of SMS is a Finnish
civil servant by the name Matti
Makkonen who then worked for a
state-owned postal and
telecommunications company Posti
(Finland). He presented the idea
in a pizzeria in Copenhagen,
during a conference of mobile
phone communication's future in
fall of 1982. Today M. Makkonen
is the CEO of Finnet. Initially
conceptualized as Message
Handling Services, SMS was
proposed to be included in the
GSM digital mobile phone
standard as early as in 1984 by
the Nordic Countries. The
first commercial short message
was sent on 3 December 1992 by
Neil Papworth of Sema Group from
a personal computer to Richard
Jarvis of Vodafone on the
Vodafone GSM network in the
United Kingdom.
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