Smart card that gives GSM phones their user identity. SIM cards make it easy for phones to be rented or borrowed.

A digital cellular phone that has text-messaging, web access and other data services along with voice.

The transmission of short text-messages to and from a mobile phone, fax machine and/or IP address. Messages must be no longer than 160 alphanumeric characters and contain no images or graphics. Once a message is sent, it is received by a Short Message Service Center (SMSC), which must then get it to the appropriate mobile device. To do this, the SMSC sends a SMS Request to the home location register (HLR) to find the roaming customer. Once the HLR receives the request, it will respond to the SMSC with the subscriber's metadata: 1) inactive or active 2) where subscriber is roaming. If the response is 'inactive' then the SMSC will hold onto the message for a period of time. When the subscriber accesses the device the HLR sends a SMS notification to the SMSC, and the SMSC will attempt delivery. The SMSC transfers the message in a Short Message Delivery Point-to- Point format to the serving system. The system pages the device, and if it responds, the message gets delivered and receives verification.

The hardware device submitting the messages. Currently, SMSC devices support binary formats. A software module called the SMS gateway is used to give instructions to the SMSC. The protocol described in this draft is proposed to provide a standard for service providers to interact with SMS gateways or SMS centers.

A sequence of commands and replies where pages are delivered to individual paging terminals. The most obvious benefit is the elimination of the need for modems and phone lines to produce alphanumeric pages, and the ease of delivery of pages to terminals in other cities or countries.

A method of digital wireless communications transmission allowing a large number of users to access a single radio-frequency channel without interference. Each user is given a unique time slot within each channel. SMS Mobile Originate has now gone live on several TDMA networks around the world including Telecom New Zealand, Midwest Wireless USA, Algar Telecom Brazil and Cellcom Israel. Other TDMA network operators such as AT&T Wireless in the U.S. have launched SMS MO nationally.

See One-Way Text-Messaging and Two-Way Text-Messaging

Sending short (wireless data) messages to a smart phone, pager, PDA or other handheld device from another web enabled device. Two-way implies that the device receiving the message is able to reply via text-messaging as well. Text-messaging implies sending short messages generally no more than a couple of hundred characters in length. In Europe, text-messaging was popularized by the GSM cell phone system's Short Messaging Service (SMS), which supports messages of up to 160 characters.