Search

Introduction Computers with the power of the internet have thrived in aiding communication among people. The telephone system, which is the main communication system that was invented several years ago, had undergone a great improvement, so much that today we have fixed wireless phones, mobile phones and the likes. With the rapid development of mobile phones come several services like the Short Messaging Service (SMS), Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) and others, 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, commercial services like share and sell (an added service provided by MTN Nigeria), where subscribers can easily share and/or sell airtime, and several others. 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. Schofield and Kubin (2002) argued that small devices could potentially provide better interface for finding information than through page browsing and other means. More than 160 billion SMS 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% on the six months before that. Nowadays, with 45 million short messages sent in the U.K. alone every day, a mobile phone that has the easiest interface for voice communication is likely to fail the user satisfaction test if it does not provide a reasonably good SMS interface. (Gorienko & Merrick, 2003) The major advantage of SMS is its cost effectiveness, and availability, as most individuals own phone. In different parts of the world, several service providers offer mobile services which include SMS. Most times the cost attached to sending a SMS is relatively small, and most providers do not charge when receiving SMS. Sometimes, service providers give users 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, there still exists the problem of checking examination results as students still throng 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 dissemination examination results as well as other information. Pramsane and Sanjaya (2006) stated that universities can 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 for it. The result checking system not only allows student to request for grades, it provides the result as soon as they as become available. This is done by pushing the result to the students (sending it to their phones), or working on a request sent from a student to produce the result (pulling). There are two methods of SMS widely used in applications; they are the PUSH & PULL. This application can either be used to push or pull messages. A Push SMS application is one whereby a message is been sent from the application to the user. …

Introduction SMS Banking is a Mobile technology that allows you to request and receive banking information from your bank on your mobile phone via Short message service (SMS). Individuals or corporate bodies can manage their bank accounts, check their account balances, perform check requests, money transfers, pay some bills, and perform other banking transactions using their mobile phones. There are two methods of SMS widely used in applications; they are the PUSH & PULL (Seylan Bank, n.d.). Push SMS is sending a message from an application (i.e. SMS Server in this case) to the Mobile Phone. It is a one way message. In other words, it's the mobile application (in this case, the SMS banking application) that initiates a message. An example could be a deposit alert, which alerts the user when a deposit is made to his/her account. Pull SMS is sending a request and obtaining a reply. This is a full duplex scenario where a user sends a request to the SMS banking application and the application replies with the information requested. An Example is when a user requests his bank account balance. The Need for SMS Banking The telecommunications industry worldwide has scrambled to bring what is available to networked computers to mobile devices (Schofield, & Kubin, 2002). Presently, the use of electronic banking is considerably high and as more and more users sign up for electronic-banking, the maturity as regards remote banking (i.e. banking outside the banking hall) is on the increase. With electronic banking, users can now conveniently carry out banking transactions, but this convenience cannot be achieved if the user does not have access to the internet, hence, in other words, the user cannot carry out a banking transaction while waiting for a bus, or perhaps while having lunch in a restaurant. With SMS banking, convenience can be achieved 24hrs a day. This is because a user has access to his mobile phone all day, at all times. So, to effectively achieve a truly convenient banking mode, a truly mobile mode of banking has to be explored, hence the need for SMS Banking. How SMS Works SMS stands for Short Message Service; it's 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 SMS are exchanged each month in European countries (Mavrakis, 2004). SMS use the GSM special signaling channel instead of the voice channel and is therefore a very reliable media channel. MAVRAKIS, 2004 identifies two types of SMS which can be classified by the origin of the message * Mobile Originated (MO): SMS-MOs' are sent from a mobile phone and could be sent either to another mobile phone (such when a mobile subscriber sends a personal message to another subscriber) or to a computer application that will process the message. * Mobile Terminated (MT): SMS-MTs' are transmitted to a mobile phone. They also could be sent by another mobile phone or generated by a computer application. The SMS processing computer applications usually runs on corporate servers that are connected to the SMS network through specialized connectors and gateways connected to the SMS Centers of mobile operators (Mavrakis, 2004). These servers are assigned short numbers instead of the traditional 10-digits mobile numbers. These numbers, also known as short codes are usually 4 to 6 digits long. These numbers are operator specific. Also, a premium fee (a fee other than the fixed rates for SMS) can be charges on these short codes; in other words, users would pay more for sending SMS to short codes. Data Mining In SMS Banking Due to the large number of users and the large amount of financial transactions expected to be carried out using SMS Banking, there is a need for methodologies of Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD). …