Free SMS chatting for GSM phone users

By Lim Tri Santosa

BANDUNG (JP): Johny Adrian, an 18-year-old student, taps at the keypad of his silver-metallic cellular phone as he sits with friends at a shopping mall, sending text messages to other friends.

Each day, he says, he pumps out as many as 30 messages, contributing to massive congestion on Satelindo cellular networks. In shopping malls or on park benches, groups of friends often sit in silence, tapping out messages on their cell phone keypads.

"It's fun," Johny says. "We just talk about stuff. It's like chatting on the Internet."

Most of the "texters" are teenagers or young professionals, that is a group labeled "generation TXT", I propose. To save keystrokes, the texters have developed their own vocabulary, typing for example "C U L8R" for "See you later".

Melia, a 17-year-old student, said most of her messages are in English instead of Indonesian.

"It's harder, but it's supposed to be more cool," she said. The messaging has even spawned its own folklore, with thousands of jokes able to be told in just two or three brief lines.

Chatting

An emerging application for the Short Message Service is chat. In the same way as Internet chat groups have proven a very popular application of the Internet, groups of like-minded people, so called communities of interest, have begun to use SMS as a means to chat, communicate and discuss. The amount of information transferred per message tends to be lower with chat, where people are more likely to state opinions than factual data.

Over six million people all over the world per day use SMS to communicate. And this fad is growing! Analysts estimate that close to 8 billion messages a month are sent using a technology called Short Messaging System (SMS).

SMS Text Messaging has its own secret, silent language. It can save time and helps make keying in, sending and receiving messages more fun than just talking on the phone. It does not require the real-time availability of two parties. Like e-mail, SMS is asynchronous, which allows users to respond when it is convenient.

There are sufficient regular users and awareness of and momentum behind the services. SMS has become an integral and important part of many customer's everyday business and personal lives. The next quantum leap in SMS traffic volumes is caused by the introduction of SMS for prepayment customers. These customers pay for their cellular airtime as they go rather than having contracts. Enabling the prepay customers to send short messages causes large traffic uplifts because the typical young person who is the main user of prepaid services is also ready, willing and able to manipulate the phone keypad and originate short messages.

SMSC

Most network operators around the world recognize the need to allow customers to send short messages to people on network operators competing in the same country as them. The addition of interworking between network operators who are competing in the same geographical market gives customers of both networks the opportunity to use SMS in the same way as they do voice. Just as they can make a voice call to each other's phones, so too can they send short messages to each other.

Unfortunately, that's not the case with Indonesian GSM network operators. Technically speaking, network operators are reluctant to allow their competitors access to their signaling channels, over which short messages are transmitted. This is because these channels also handle voice call set up and other mission-critical tasks. Because SMS is a store and forward service, every single short message of any type passes through an SMS Center (SMSC = Message Center Number).

It is not possible to make SMS available without an SMS Center since all short messages pass through the SMS Center. To release national SMS interconnects, there are some issues.

From a commercial perspective, network operators competing in the same country often charge different prices for SMS service and offer different services. In such cases, knowledgeable users could benefit from accessing less expensive or more sophisticated Short Message Services by changing SMS Center addresses or sending their messages in a different way. A price has to be agreed upon for such inter-network national messaging to discourage or prevent such behavior.

Internet SMS

But what else is missing in this service? For one, how nice it would be if text messaging or SMS would go global without the high cost that usually comes with international communications. Well, here is good news for us; and maybe not so good for the telecommunication giants. Thanks to the geniuses in the Internet, this service is now available -- for free.

This means that if you have a text-capable cell phone, your relatives abroad can now send you short text messages, and vice versa. Log on to the Internet and visit www.quios.com and see for yourself. This San Francisco-based start-up will surely make waves. But alas, Quios only gives each registered member a maximum 10 messages per day. Another site is www.mtnsms.com, very reliable for Telkomsel subscribers, but also good enough for Satelindo users. You can send as many messages as you can type.

The disadvantage of Quios and mtnsms service is you have to log on to their web site first, before you can start sending your SMS messages. Now, you need not, as a new software called CellBuddys can bridge those web sites. CellBuddys (www.cellbuddys.com) is a compact but highly efficient cell phone messaging application that enables you to send SMS text messages to cell phones all over the world via Internet.

Easily installed and instantly accessible from your system tray, this program features a modest-sized interface displaying a list of your cell "buddys" and a simple menu that lets you add more "buddys" to your list.

Features include a buddy message history that can be enabled/disabled and an Update Servers function that enables you to update/add the latest available plug-in servers. Connecting to servers such as MTN SMS and Quios, this free text-messaging program broadens your reach to global proportions.

CellBuddys can only determine if the message was successfully sent to the server. Sometimes the servers are backlogged and there may be delays in delivering messages. Usually messages are sent after a few seconds. If you are sending using the mtnsms server you can log in to their site and view your "outbox", it gives you a list of all pending/delivered/failed messages.

Neither Quios nor mtnsms displays your original cell phone number (CLI= the calling identification number). Hence, the recipient will not know who is the sender, unless you state your name in the message. Hold on! There is a new SMS service from Netherlands called XOIP.com.

XOIP.com is the best, because the CLI displays your original cell phone number, hence the recipient will know who is the sender. When you register to XOIP.com, you should fill in your original cell phone number, this number will be used by XOIP SMSC as the CLI. For convenient chatting with XOIP, I suggest you should press Ctrl+N (if you use Microsoft Explorer) to open several "sms-sending" windows.

It is a good idea to send a test message to your cell phone first, to know how fast the delivery time is at the present time. If the message is delivered within a few seconds, then you will be sure that the foreign SMSC is not in full swing (below normal- traffic usage), then you are ready to chat with your friends. Do not try to change the Message Center Number setting on your cell phone menu, because it will not work! Especially for Telkomsel users, please do not try to change the setting. Even though you can send SMS with foreign SMSC, the message will not reach the recipient and your account will be debited Rp 500 for nothing.

Yes, there are a lot of foreign SMSC numbers, but unfortunately, we, as the subscribers of Indonesian GSM network cannot utilize them. I think either foreign GSM network operators or Indonesian GSM operators have already protected their SMSC from being used by other networks. Thus, they cannot be accessed unless they enter into a mutual agreement. That is why you cannot send SMS in Indonesia to different network operators, unless you buy a relatively expensive SMS token like smsoke.com or use free e-mail-sms technique (as mentioned in my previous article: Sending SMS between Satelindo and Telkomsel, JP, Aug. 21, 2000) or use the above free sms web service. (abbaml@rad.net.id)