160 characters is a very irritating limit, and we are stuck with it for a long time, whether we like it or not.

There are few alternatives to standard SMS, one of which is email. In fact, in Japan, email is used in place of SMS. This is because their networks are almost entirely 3G, highly tuned for high bandwidth transfer. I doubt they use GSM at all. However, the move to email presents 2 big problems.

Cost

The first would be the price. According to the Singtel FAQ, 3G transfer rates are priced at 0.37¢ / KB. In order to match the price that you pay for a single SMS, you would have to use less than about 13 KB to process an email. This is made difficult by the fact that you have to incur bandwidth when you receive emails, scaled proportionally to the size of the email, as well as while sending them. Additionally, POP3 and SMTP protocols might incur more bandwidth on top of that spent on the email.

The flip side is true as well. The smaller emails you send, the lesser you pay. Remember that 1 KB = 1024 bytes = 1024 characters. That’s a crap lot compared to 160.

But then again this is based on a pay-per-use basis. Correct me if I’m wrong, but according to some exchange students that came over, they pay a flat fee for their mobile phone plan, and they can send as much email as they like. I suppose this fee covers their internet usage, which includes emails, and they don’t have to worry about the length of the emails they send.

Mobile service providers give free SMS, and rarely free bandwidth for stuff such as emails. To use emails in place of SMS now, is to waste away your free SMS. Given the current pricing plans by all the mobile service providers, people are satisfied with just using SMS.

People Are Too Damn Lazy

The second, and I believe bigger, issue would be the fact that even if you started to use email now, no one would be replying. When you receive an SMS, you get an alert immediately. It is possible to use email in similar fashion on most new mobile phone models (I know SE has it), except that no one has their phones configured to use that. So what’s the use of pumping out cheap long emails when no one’s going to reply to your email until they read it on their computers?

It would also be highly advisable for people to get an email account separate from the one they use for everyday usage. This is to avoid downloading unnecessary content in your emails. Remember that emails are a replacement of sorts for SMS, so you should be seeing nothing but text. This is very convenient in Japan. When you register for your line, they make you sign up up for an email account with the provider, so you often see xxx@docomo. Those are email accounts checked with phones.

But elsewhere in the world? It requires people to go an extra step of getting a new email account, telling all their friends that they now have a second email address specific for short messages. People are just too lazy to do that, if it isn’t easily done.

To put it simply, people are quite unwilling to move away from what already works for them to something better. You don’t hear too many complaints about SMS because people find that it satisfies their needs. The benefits of email aren’t sufficiently appealing because it doesn’t solve any existing pressing problems.

The Companies

And finally, you have the people who run the show. I’m talking about the mobile service companies like Singtel and Starhub and M1. There is no incentive for them to upgrade their equipment and services, making the move towards email or something better than SMS. If there is almost zilch demand from their customers, why would they bother anyway?

However, I think this will change in a matter of years. The capabilities of mobile phones are already extremely underused, and yet they continue to improve, with new features always being added to new models. 10 years ago, most used their phones for nothing more than SMS and calls. Now, though small in number, there are those who consistently use the Internet capabilities, organiser features, and even make 3G video calls. And this group will continue to grow in number, with the number of activities increasing.

The consumer almost never demands change (unless you’re like me). But companies who want to stay competitive nationally, and to a lesser extent internationally, will want to make use of better technology to beat the rest. Whoever does it first tends to take the lead. Once, there was Singapore Cable Vision, and then Starhub went and took over, but at the same time inheriting the cable lines that were already in place in homes all over Singapore. And this is where Starhub gained an edge over Singtel and Pacific Internet. They were first to implement high speed broadband access in homes across the island, and at reasonable rates without much hassle. My first broadband line was Starhub, and that has never changed.

In terms of mobile phone and service technology, we’re 4 or 5 years behind Japan and South Korea. I can’t comment on whether that gap is closing, but I am happy that we are in some respects following in their footsteps. We are indeed making a move towards 3G, but it is slow. I applaud incentives like MobileM@il, a service offered by Singtel that allows you to check you emails for free. But of course, hardly anyone sees it as an alternative to traditional SMS.

I cannot wait for the day when email becomes a viable alternative to SMS. The Japanese (and Koreans) get all the love.