Deaf Benefit Greatly from SMS

From: Wired News - Oct 18, 2004

By Patrick Gray

02:00 AM Oct. 18, 2004 PT

Research out of Australian universities on text-based mobile messaging could herald good news for the deaf in the United States -- if cellular carriers can agree to improve interoperability between networks.

A joint research project between Australia's Bond and Griffith universities has found the deaf community is a major beneficiary of the mobile text-messaging craze. In Australia, more than 50 percent of the general population sends at least one text message a day. The result is a nearly universal, text-based communications medium that connects the deaf to the hearing world.

"The deaf have taken to this technology as an answer to their prayers," researchers wrote in the recently released report, Everyone Here Speaks TXT. "Where the mobile-phone service providers have agreed to interconnect their networks, (deaf people) can take their means of communication with them as far as they can go and reach anyone who has a mobile phone."

The Executive Director of the Deaf Society of New South Wales, Sharon Everson, says the text craze has been "brilliant" for Australia's deaf, and expects the same phenomenon to hit the United States. By using text messaging, deaf mobile users can order a pizza, invite friends for a beer or even just have a chat, she said. Teenagers in particular are making the most out of the popularity of text messaging.

"It's great for younger people because their group of friends is extended to their peer group, and not just other deaf people," Everson said.

All Australian cellular networks were, until recently, based on GSM, a mobile standard that supports the short message service, or SMS, protocol. But even new, third-generation networks are backwardly compatible with the GSM text-messaging standard, and telephone network interoperability is written into the law. If you run a mobile phone network, it has to work with the others.

While the craze has been a boon to Australia's deaf, things are not as simple in the United States. Network interoperability issues have stunted the growth of SMS in the United States, meaning many mobile handsets in the country are simply incapable of messaging each other.

The report by Australian researchers found that in the United States and Canada, deaf people are sending text messages mainly to each other through two-way pagers.

But the increasing popularity of GSM mobile phone services and growing consolidation in the mobile telephony industry means the United States may come up to speed, said Paul Budde, a telecommunications analyst based in Australia. For now, however, that's not the case.

"It's very, very fragmented, and there are very few regulations that create interoperability," Budde said. "Each provider has to negotiate with each other to get this interoperability."

Still, given current industry trends, Budd is optimistic that in the not-too-distant future, America's deaf will be communicating with nearly everyone through text messaging.

"Consolidation is creating a number of large players, and that's spawning interoperability arrangements," he said. "Over the next couple of years it will be rectified."

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