5 - 11 July 2001
Issue No.541
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 5 - 11 July 2001 Issue No.541 |
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You've got a message
Soha Abdelaty looks at message mania
You are stuck in a meeting when you realise you have forgotten to make an urgent call. In days of yore, you would have to leave the room, making an embarrassing exit under a hail of dirty looks from your disturbed colleagues. Today there is SMS -- shorthand for short message service -- a discreet and effective way of getting out what needs to said, without actually saying it.
SMS has become a popular method of exchanging text and picture messages between mobile users across the world. And while it would seem that this trend extends to Egypt as well, local mobile service providers Click and MobiNil have been conspicuously guarded about their statistics.
Texting has been available on both networks for some time now. Click began offering the service for post-paid customers in February 1999, and for pre-paid a year later; MobiNil began offering SMS in March 2000. But as options for this service increase, so has the market for SMS. Both Click and MobiNil users can now send messages to any country abroad, for example, as long as there is a roaming agreement between the local network and the foreign company.
Click subscribers have the exclusive advantage of being able to send messages to the popular instant messaging service ICQ. MobiNil, on the other hand, allows users to send one message to multiple users for the price of one SMS -- also known as group SMS (this service is only offered to post-paid customers). Web sites and instant messaging services have jumped on the SMS bandwagon, incorporating ways to send SMS messages to mobiles and offering subscriptions to receive news, jokes, etc. One useful example last Ramadan was a Web site offering a reminder message of the time for iftar.
While texting is obviously popular in Egypt, exact figures for SMS traffic remains a private matter as far as Click and MobiNil are concerned. MobiNil declined to reveal any numbers to Al-Ahram Weekly, while Click officials offered a "40 per cent penetration level."
Will SMS take over other mobile phone services -- even basic phone calls? There are several reasons why a user might prefer to send an SMS than make a call. High on this list is cost. Post-paid MobiNil subscribers pay 25 piastres per SMS, while post-paid Click users pay 30 piastres. A message costs 50 piastres on both networks if the user is pre-paid. A picture message or tone is usually charged as three text messages.
"An analogy can be made here to the introduction of the fax service. At the time, faxing was seen as a more 'effective' service, which allowed businesses to communicate longer messages in a shorter period of time -- thus cutting down on international call costs," Mohamed Abdel-Salam, product and services executive at Click told Al-Ahram Weekly. "Although not identical to this scenario, SMS is a similar case."
People are texting more and more, but they haven't reduced their phone calls either. "Although [SMS] is very successful value-added service locally and internationally, [it] has still not reached the maturity in the Egyptian GSM market to have a cannibalising effect on other services, such as voice for example," notes Abdel-Salam.
E-mail made communication instant, but SMS has made it easily accessible, enabling users to reach someone on the other side of the globe at any time of the day and without depending on a computer. People have started forwarding jokes and messages by SMS as well. "Unlike e-mail, you don't need a computer ... any GSM handset will work, so it is more practical. Being mobile, it is available any time, any where," says Osman Sultan, President and CEO of MobiNil. Osman concedes, however, that SMS still has its limitations. An SMS message cannot exceed a certain number of characters and, naturally, the recipient must be equipped with a GSM phone.
Despite the breadth of texting options that are being offered by the two networks, it is not possible to exchange SMS messages between Click and MobiNil. Although this a remarkably serious stumbling block, both companies seem to have taken a relaxed approach to overcoming it, as they've done nothing about it. There may be hope, however. The two networks insist they're working on establishing compatible SMS within the coming year. With the prospects of a third private mobile company looming, the existing two just might move a bit faster.
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