CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION      
1.1            BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
Computers with the power of the Internet have succeeded in aiding communication among people. The telephone system, which is the main communication system that was invented several years ago, has undergone a great improvement, so much that today we have fixed wireless phones, mobile phones, and the like. With the rapid development of mobile phones come several services, like the Short Messaging Service (SMS) and Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), which are readily available and add to the usefulness of mobile phones. SMS in particular is widely used in communication and, more recently, has been leveraged to provide several services like airline ticketing, banking services, and commercial services such as share and sell where subscribers can easily share and/or sell airtime. SMS is a mobile technology that allows for sending and receiving text or even binary messages to and from a mobile phone. The relative ease of use of SMS makes it possible for a user to learn how to send SMS easily. More than 160 billion SMSs are exchanged each month in European countries (Mavrakis, 2004), and according to Resource Shelf (2006), 48.7 billion SMS messages were sent in the second half of 2005, which is up 50% from the six months before that. The major advantage of SMS is its cost effectiveness and availability, as most individuals own a phone.
In different parts of the world, several service providers offer mobile services that include SMS. Most times the cost attached to sending a SMS is relatively small, and most providers do not charge for receiving SMS. Sometimes, service providers give users a certain amount of free SMS per month, which allows customers send and receive unlimited number of SMS messages. It is possible to acquire a special dedicated line that uses a custom rate for messages sent to the number; it is also possible to have a number as toll free, making it free for users to send SMS to the number. All these contribute to what makes SMS a really cost effective means of disseminating information.
Till today, especially in the developing countries like Nigeria, there still exists the problem of checking examination results as students throng to notice boards in anxiety, although most universities, even those in the less developed countries, now make examination results available on their websites. The level of Internet availability in less developed countries is still low and quite expensive. Even in the developed countries, where most homes have Internet access, SMS is still a faster and cheaper means of disseminating examination results as well as other information. Pramsane and Sanjaya (2006) stated that universities could provide educational services based on SMS, such as grade release, enrollment information, university announcement, and internship opportunity. An advantage SMS offers is that students can receive valuable information on the fly without requesting it.