Short-messaging service subscribers can send, and depending on their service, receive limited 300-byte messages on their phones.
In the United States, only Nextel, AT&T wireless and GSM providers like VoiceStream Wireless offer two-way SMS.
But if an Indian telephony company has its way, SMS subscribers will be able to access much more content -- and from any e-mail account.
"With many older phones it's still one-way, meaning you can receive, but you can't send messages," said Bret Clement, spokesman for LetsTalk.com.
BPL Mobile, a mobile telephony provider in India, just unveiled a mobile Internet portal that can be accessed by mobile phone users via wireless application protocol (WAP) or SMS.
While mobile-phone users with WAP or Internet-desktop access can access their e-mail, read, reply, download and send messages, BPL Mobile would allow you to do those activities on SMS.
"Other SMS providers don't give this level of e-mail access," said Ram Sundaram, head of technology for the Web solutions arm of the BPL Innovation Group. "Another aspect is that using your SMS you can access e-mails from all account holders."
This is significant outside the United States, where more people have SMS than WAP. In Western Europe alone, 57.3 billion messages will be sent by 82 million subscribers in 2001, according to market research firm IDC. That's up from 25 million subscribers and 11.9 billion messages sent last year.
"It works on phones that aren't WAP," said Neerav Berry, vice president of marketing for Cellmania.com. "The limitation of SMS is that each message can only be a few hundred bytes."
SMS can also deliver messages at almost instantaneous speeds with low error rates.
Here's how BPL's portal works for SMS users: Users must subscribe to BPL Mobile services and then are assigned a user name and password like any e-mail account. Users then don't have to download the mail from their other accounts, but check them all on BPL portals using their new login and password.
Sounds simple, though Sundaram says the company has no remedy for the daunting task of having to press so many buttons to type a message.
"I understand the discomfort with typing messages, but one should understand that this service is chiefly a value addition," he said. "We would presume that you would send a mail over mobile phone only when you don't have any other choice. There is no contesting the fact that a keyboard is a more comfortable way of typing a message."
BPL's service is already available in India and is coming to Europe and the United States in March.
