TEXTING has been a surprise “killer application”, generating unexpected
megabucks for cellphone operators around the world. Now telecoms company BT
wants to bring texting to Britain’s landline phones. And it’s managed to launch
the technology on the high street before anyone else got a sniff of the firm’s
plans.
Texting works because cellphones can hide short messages in the unused space
in a network’s control channels, which are used to set up speech calls. But
landlines don’t have these channels, so BT’s new system makes use of the
modem-like tones that convey the number of a caller to the phone receiving the
call—allowing some landline phones to display an incoming call’s
number.
BT’s new £100 digital cordless phone, the Diverse 4010, launched last
week, simply adds text message data to the caller ID tones. It can send a text
message to a cellphone or another of the new phones, using BT’s Cellnet cellular
network.
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The new system lets you send texts to any cellphone in Britain for 12p, and
it receives messages free. So far, it can only receive texts from Cellnet
phones, but other networks in Britain, Germany and Italy are planning to get
connected to the system, which has just been approved for use by the European
Telecommunications Standards Institute.
