Texting has been a surprise “killer application”, generating unexpected megabucks for cellphone operators around the world. Now telecoms company BT is bringing texting to the UK’s landline phones. And it has 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.
