The beauty of SMS is its serendipity. It was "just there" as an unused network feature and somebody thought to commercialise it. Back in the 90s the telcos wer

The beauty of SMS is its serendipity. It was "just there" as an unused network feature and somebody thought to commercialise it. Back in the 90s the telcos were completely caught off guard - this was signalling architecture meant for setup/teardown of calls and other bits and pieces. Overnight a booming cottage industry in SMS Service Centres sprung up to offload all the additional traffic.