SMS vs E-mail: competitors or co-workers?

Invented only a decade ago, text messaging quickly evolved into a major source of income for telecommunication companies. It is said that it has the best dollar-per-megabyte ratio of all existing forms of data transmission. Several factors contributed to its success - low consumer cost (combined with high telco profits), its asynchronous and non-intrusive nature as well as the sheer efficiency of "impulse-driven" knowledge exchange. While it's far from perfect, SMS continues its triumph worldwide.

Simultaneously with text messaging, another form of communication was stirring a revolution. E-mail maintains double-digit growth rates years after it was introduced (admittedly, spam is responsible for a big part of it). Nowadays, e-mail provides a reliable way to exchange all kinds of media (and text of course) with peers all over the world. Best of all, it's free (not including the cost of internet access).

Both protocols coexisted peacefully for sometime and grew in parallel. However, lately device convergence really started to manifest itself through the appearance of internet connectivity in every cell phone. A new question arose - is SMS really all that different from e-mail? Do we need both? Let's try to ponder this question without getting too involved with the technical side of things.

First of all, an attempt to "improve" and diversify the uses of SMS - known as MMS, already failed once. In the world where hundreds of new handsets are released every month, the only hope for interoperability is fully complying with standards. While GSM is well-defined, the world of multimedia software and hardware makes it a real challenge to create and stick to one spec, especially when this specification is not related to core device functionality (GSM communication).

An obvious option is to eliminate SMS altogether in favour of e-mail. Aside from configuration problems there are several major obstacles to this. First of all, it opens our increasingly personal mobile devices to the flood of spam, work-related e-mail and other attention-consuming letters. It's one thing to exchange short messages with several friends and it's totally different to get bombarded with kylobytes of text. Short messages enhance our everyday experience, filling it with emotion and relevant knowledge, while the majority of e-mails require our full attention and thus "distract" us from our mobile lifestyles. Don't you feel sorry for the CrackBerry addicts, replying to work emails during commuting, eating and socializing?

Another opponent of this convergence would be the mobile carriers themselves. E-mail is inherently free. SMS is not. Losing a billion-dollar revenue stream in favour of technical simplicity would not get any exec excited. Interestingly enough, charges for message delivery also keep away the spammers, so there is a certain benefit in having to pay for them.

Last but not least, SMS is more efficient with its use of the cellular network. E-mails (even if they do not contain attachments) can easily take up ten times as much space due to various headers and other delivery information embedded in them. While the networks might not be as overloaded as the carriers like to you think when they raise the charges, efficiency is good! One more point for SMS.

In general, since e-mail and text messaging serve different purposes, it's not likely to see one "kill off" the other in the near future. Instead, let's hope that SMS prices will go down while worldwide delivery mechanizms improve. I'll text you later!