Telecom Sector - 3 : How is India using SMS ?

With 23 telecom circles, 15 telecom operators and 900+ million mobile subscribers, India is the 2nd largest telecom industry across the Globe (in terms of subscribers). The profiles of the users consuming mobile services in rural and urban areas would be quite different. The type of mobile phones - basic, feature and smartphone - are also varying across the terrain of India from north to south and east to west. Irrespective of all these variations, one mode of communication which is widely used through mobiles is Short Messaging Service (SMS) by most of the Indians. This simple service, which relies on the back-bone of Information Technology (IT), is used in a variety of ways.

An Entrepreneur would need to know about these possibilities to see how to leverage SMS in his venture.

1. Web to Mobile through SMS : It is not necessary that one needs to send an SMS from mobile. We can send an SMS, that too free, from websites like Way2SMS. You just need to register with an Indian mobile number. You can add numbers to phone-book in this site and send messages to a group at-a-time as well. This site also offers the ability to get SMS alerts when a new mail is received in Gmail, Yahoo or MSN account. We just need to link Way2SMS and these mail accounts on their website for that. Apparently, there is an Android application as well, which can allow sending SMS for free across India. Just search for 'Free SMS India' in Google Play Store.

2. There are customer-facing IT applications across different verticals like Banking & Finance, E-Commerce and Retail. These systems need to be up and running all the time as down-time for even a few minutes could cause heavy losses. SMS can be leveraged for a variety of causes in this context, like:
• A mission critical server just went down?
• Particular flight is delayed and the customers need to be informed?
• An e-commerce store has just crashed?
• An alert when a credit-card of a customer is swiped at an outlet?
• Notifications about policy changes, product updates and regular account details

3. TV Reality shows have become popular in India in the first decade of this millennium. An important aspect of the program is voting for the candidate by the viewers of the program in TV. This 'Engagement Marketing' solution relies on SMS. Indian Idol, Dance India Dance, Sa Re Ga Ma and Kaun Banega Crorepati (KBC) are some of the cases in point.

4. Subscriptions - Mobile users on-the-go can subscribe to information related to news, astrology, cricket, bollywood and the like by sending an activation SMS. Once subscribed, the user would receive the text information on the subscribed topic at the pre-defined frequency. The user need to remember the number (Shortcode) to which the subscription SMS has to be sent with a Keyword.

5. If one has to subscribe to specific type of content (say cricket scores or news), one needs to know the corresponding 'shortcode' and 'keyword'. It might be difficult to remember many such codes and words. The easiest option would be to us an SMS Browser. Insta SMS from Indiatimes is one such browser. This browser provides access to the same information as in subscriptions but through a convenient and familiar menu-driven native application on a featured phone; request to the server and response from the server are through SMS messages, which doesn't really matter to the end-user.

6. Mobile Marketing is one channel which has been used extensively by not just small and medium enterprises but also large enterprises. How would they send out bulk messages, when there is a special offer, a contest or launch of a new product / service? This is supported through bulk SMS dispatch provided by 3rd parties running SMS gateways. These gateways expose an API that can be used for marketing from our IT applications. These 3rd parties would in-turn integrate with the SMS gateways of telecom operators. Unfortunately, the database of mobile numbers of a particular market segment are obtained illegally in many cases. That is the reason the telecom regulatory body introduced 'Do Not Disturb' feature, which does not seem to work in true sense.

7. Mobile Ticketing - Bus Ticket booking and Train Ticket booking sites on the Internet have adopted m-tickets, which are basically tickets dispatched to passengers as SMS on their mobiles. Passengers can actually show these mobile tickets to board the transport vehicle. This paper-less boarding is applicable in case of private buses and Indian Railways. Though a similar SMS message is available for flight bookings, an additional step of collecting the physical boarding pass cannot be avoided at present.

8. When there are so many possibilities with SMS, there should be a way to create an open ecosystem to develop custom SMS applications. That is precisely being done by SMS GupShup and TxtWeb. SMS Gupshup enables group chat while allowing creation and joining of new or pre-defined groups. They also seem to support (though there are any applications developed recently) 3rd party SMS application development. TxtWeb, another SMS application ecosystem player, allows publishing of content to the mobile phones through text-based sites at the back-end. They simplified the development of such 3rd party text-based sites.

9. Amidst all these possibilities let's not forget about the regular way of sending an SMS - mobile-to-mobile or rather person-to-person. Sending international SMS messages through applications like Jaxtr (by Hotmail fame Sabeer Bhartia) are reducing the cost to communicate across the borders.

 

Millions of SMS messages are created, shared with people, dispatched from machines and processed by message brokers at 3rd parties or telecom operators to make a difference to lives of people !

While some of the SMS services are free, some are charged at a very high price. Check for the prices before using any of them. Even with so many free SMS services, Telecom Operators are earning about 5% of their revenues through SMS ! With applications like 'WhatsApp', which allow sharing short text messages without relying on SMS, we need to see how the SMS ecosystem develops going forward.

Isn't it amazing how a simple text messaging service is used for such a wide-ranging impact? Are you aware of any other SMS services?