The popularity of texting has sky rocketed in the past few years. Texting has become the most popular way that young people all over the world communicate with each other, and it has also started to be used more often by adults and older people. But how does texting actually work?
Texting, also known as Short Messaging Service (SMS), is a method of communication which involves sending text to and from different mobile phones. Phones are always sending and receiving information from cell phone towers through pathways called control channels, even when they're not being used. Depending on the location of your phone, it will communicate with different towers, and can change between those towers as you move around a city, country or even the world. If your phone cannot communicate with a tower, it is said to have no signal, and it cannot send or receive texts or calls until it finds a signal again.
When you send a text message to a friend, the message is first sent through a control channel to your closest cell phone tower. The tower then sends this message to the SMS Centre. The SMSC finds out who you are sending the message to, and then sends it to the closest cell phone tower to that location. That tower then sends it to your friend's phone as a small packet of data, through a control channel. In this entire process, the job of the SMS is to format the message in a way that it can be sent to and from the cell phone towers and then to your friend's phone. The SMS also sends information about the text message, such as the length of the message, its destination and the time it was sent
