Text Messaging Through SMS Gateway Sets World Record

If you still think that text messaging is just sending a quick "I love you" to your sweetie, you're behind the technology curve. Text Messaging is big business and it's getting bigger thanks to the power of the SMS gateway.

Take the case of text messaging world record that was set during the "Live 8" concerts held on 2 July 2005 where a million or more people attended concerts on four continents held to encourage the "Group of Eight" (G8), the world's most wealthiest nations, to cancel the debts that were overwhelming the world's poorest African nations.

Anticipating the unprecedented demand for tickets, the concert organizers choose to sell thousands of tickets via a lottery, and they choose SMS or Text Messaging as the vehicle for entering the lottery and purchasing the tickets.

When the dust finally settled, and the text messaging technology service providers got together to compare notes, it was determined that the SMS gateway network had handled 2,060,285 text messages with a peak text message average of an astounding 611 text messages per second. That was a feat which earned text messaging a place in the Guinness Book of World Records.

But it wasn't just the shear volume of text messages processed through the SMS gateway that is so interesting. It's the fact that text messaging is such a widely-accepted technology that the concert organizers could sell so many tickets to people who used nothing more than a typical mobile device to complete the transaction.

The lottery worked by requiring the entrant to answer the question of "What city will the next G8 Summit be held in?"

Each participant who sent an SMS text message through the SMS gateway to the special lottery number was charged £1.50 (US$2.60). Every penny of the money collected was donated to the Live 8 charity event.

Lottery winners received a text message back through the SMS gateway providing a unique PIN code as well as the URL to a web site where they were required to enter their mobile phone number, and the PIN, in order to claim their ticket.

Yes, text messaging has come along way in a short time, but you haven't seen anything yet.

The key to being able to pull off a text messaging achievement as big as the Live 8 event lies in emerging text messaging technology which allows bulk SMS text messaging users to send huge quantities of text messages automatically through the SMS gateway.

Text messaging technology and SMS gateway service providers have developed the next generation of text messaging software that enables software applications to send and receive text messages as easily as they send and receive e-mail.