Over 10 years ago you could buy ringtones via SMS, how were the ringtones sent to you, after paying them with an SMS?
In: Technology
When you wanted a cool new ringtone for your phone, you could send a special text message (SMS) with a code to a number provided by your phone company. They would then charge your phone bill for the cost of the ringtone. After that, you’d get a message back with a link or a file to download the ringtone straight to your phone. It was like magic, but with texting!
When you bought ringtones via SMS, you’d get a text with a download link after paying. Clicking it would send you a file to set as your ringtone. Super simple!
The ringtones were packed into an SMS message (or several, if it didn’t fit into one).
While SMS were designed to send text, nothing is really stopping someone from packing arbitrary data into one. The then-top companies-producers of mobile phones – Ericsson, Motorola, Siemens, Alcatel – came together with [EMS protocol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_Messaging_Service), which allowed to transfer small files via SMS. If your phone supported EMS – it could extract ringtones from such special SMS. If it did not – it would just receive garbage mix of characters.
Later, MMS were developed, which used Internet to transfer data. It allowed sending pictures, videos, and music. It still used SMS to notify the phone that a new message have arrived, but the message itself were stored on a Web server.
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