GSM Glossary of Terms

Global Gystem for Mobile Communications (originally from Groupe Spécial Mobile) - is the world's most popular standard for mobile telephony systems.

GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications: originally from Groupe Spécial Mobile) is the world's most popular standard for mobile telephony systems. The GSM Association estimates that 80% of the global mobile market uses the standard. GSM is used by over 1.5 billion people across more than 212 countries and territories. This ubiquity means that subscribers can use their phones throughout the world, enabled by international roaming arrangements between mobile network operators. GSM differs from its predecessor technologies in that both signaling and speech channels are digital, and thus GSM is considered a second generation (2G) mobile phone system. This also facilitates the wide-spread implementation of data communication applications into the system.

The GSM standard has been an advantage to both consumers, who may benefit from the ability to roam and switch carriers without replacing phones, and also to network operators, who can choose equipment from many GSM equipment vendors. GSM also pioneered low-cost implementation of the short message service (SMS), also called text messaging, which has since been supported on other mobile phone standards as well. The standard includes a worldwide emergency telephone number feature (112).

Source: WIKIPEDIA