05-10-2017, 02:45 PM
In recent years, the GSM cell phone has grown from a luxury property owned by the wealthy to something so common that one in five Filipinos already owns one. This is astonishing when we look at the fact that our country is a developing country with almost half of our population living below the poverty line. This growing popularity of the GSM cell phone has boosted the growth of the country's cellular network infrastructure led by the two main players, Ayala Globe Telecom and Smart Cellular of PLDT. All major urban areas are currently covered by both cellular providers, and soon every corner of the Philippine archipelago is a cell phone call away. The main reason we can see this tremendous and unexpected cellular boom is the popularity of short message service (SMS) in the Philippines. Locally called "text messaging", Filipinos send more text messages, then the whole of Europe combined. The Philippine need for constant communication with family and friends, coupled with the relatively inexpensive method of sending short text messages to them, has driven a GSM revolution in the country. In fact, rarely does a Filipino really use his cell phone to make a phone call, preferring "text" anything and everything. The boom of "text messages" has not gone unnoticed by businessmen. A variety of services have grown around "text messaging". Users will pay double or quadruple of the normal SMS rate for a specific service, such as talks, news / traffic reports and download of ringtones for their phones. These services are allied with one or more cellular network providers that will give them a special telephone number that can receive and monitor the text messages sent to them by their customers. This many-to-one network of SMS transmission has become very popular and many a business has entered this model with mixed results. However, from this writing, the vast majority of companies that revolve around the GSM-SMS system have addressed consumers.