The first commercial deployment of a short message text message service center (SMSC) was by Aldiscon part of Logica (now part of Acision) with Telia (now TeliaSonera) in Sweden in 1993, followed by Fleet Call (now Nextel) in the US, Telenor in Norway[citation needed] and BT Cellnet (now O2 UK)[citation needed] later in 1993. All first installations of SMS gateways were for network notifications sent to mobile phones, usually to inform of voice mail messages. The first commercially sold SMS service was offered to consumers, as a person-to-person text messaging service by text message service Radiolinja (now part of Elisa) in Finland in 1993. Most early GSM mobile phone handsets did not support the ability to send SMS text messages, and Nokia was the only handset manufacturer whose total GSM phone line in 1993 supported text message service user-sending of SMS text messages.
According to Matti Makkonen, the inventor of SMS text messages, Nokia 2010, which text message service was released in January 1994, was the first mobile phone to support composing SMSes easily. SMS Today In 2010, 6.1 trillion (6.1 × 1012) SMS text messages were sent. This translates into an average of 193,000 SMS per text message service second. SMS has become a huge commercial industry, earning $114.6 billion globally in 2010. The global average price for an SMS message is US$0.11, while mobile networks charge each other interconnect fees of at least US$0.04 when text message service connecting between different phone networks. In 2015, the actual cost of sending an SMS in Australia was found to be $0.00016 per SMS.
In 2014, Caktus Group developed the world's first SMS-based voter text message service registration system in Libya. So far, more than 1.5 million people have registered using that system, providing Libyan voters with unprecedented access to the democratic process. While SMS is still a growing market, traditional SMS is becoming increasingly challenged by alternative messaging services such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Viber text message service available on smartphones with data connections, especially in Western countries where these services are growing in popularity. It has been reported that over 97% of smartphone owners use alternative messaging services at least once a day. Enterprise SMS messaging also known as application-to-peer messaging (A2P Messaging) or 2-way SMS, continues to text message service grow steadily at a rate of 4% annually.