February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
This is a compelling fact because text messaging — brief messages sent to and from cellular phones — is a service that took off in Europe some years ago but until recently has been relatively rare in the U.S.
And forget about texting across the Atlantic — most cell-phone-mad Irish people could not text their cell-phone-mad friends in New York — until a recent development announced by telecommunications giant AT&T: text messages to the U.S. are finally getting through.
It was a classic problem of companies competing for customers, creating parallel networks that would not quite match up.
But first, a survey: two-thirds of cell phone users surveyed in the UK and Ireland by KRC Research of London believed mistakenly that they could always text someone in the U.S.
“There are about 150 carriers in the U.S.,” said Jonathan Linner, chief executive of wireless marketing firm Enpocket.
They simply don’t all interconnect.
“Different carriers have implemented text messaging in different ways,” Linner said. “Some had 110 character messages, some 120 characters, some 140 and some 160.”
Most people in the UK and Ireland who did try to text people in the U.S. had the satisfaction of seeing the message exiting from their cell phone screen — but the fact that their friends of colleagues did not reply did not indicate to them that the message never reached these shores.
Some of the fastest-growing U.S. cell phone companies are smaller, older companies lumped together by mergers.
Cingular, for instance, is the marriage of four separate operators and brings together three different mobile-phone technologies.
Technically, texting is called SMS messaging. AT&T’s new wireless reciprocal international SMS service allows Ireland’s text-mad population to reach their friends on this side of the Atlantic: the Irish are one of the top texting populations in the world, and texting remained a growth area in recent years, when other areas of the cellular phone industry were stagnating.
The service now reaches mobile users in 50 countries across 120 foreign operators, including Vodafone, O2 and Meteor in Ireland, to cover the majority of the world’s mobile subscribers.
“AT&T Wireless is leading the charge to meet the growing need for text messaging services for billions of users around the world,” said Glenice MacLellan, vice president of messaging services at AT&T Wireless. “For many people, especially Europeans, text messaging is the preferred way of communicating with friends and family. AT&T Wireless’ global reach is significant for them, as loved-ones and colleagues are now just a text message away.”
Virtually all Irish mobile phone users can now exchange messages with some 20 million AT&T Wireless subscribers with compatible handsets. Pricing may vary, depending on the carriers’ and individuals’ pre-arranged billing agreements.
AT&T Wireless customers in the U.S. can reply or originate text messages to users in other countries for 25 cents. Unlike with most other carriers, AT&T Wireless customers pay only for text messages that they send. Customer can receive unlimited incoming text messages at no charge.
In addition, AT&T Wireless’ Next Generation GSM/GPRS customers can roam on various networks while abroad and can use their phones to send an receive messages to and from users in the United States and other countries for 50 cents.
In addition to Ireland, AT&T Wireless now offers text-messaging service internationally in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and the UK.
A complete list of countries that support international text messaging can be found at www.attwireless.com/text/international. The company said it will continue to expand international text messaging capabilities throughout the year.
In February 2003, AT&T introduced multimedia messaging service to the U.S., allowing customers to combine color pictures, animations, text and sound that can be sent to and from wireless phones.