Messaging

If you have an iPhone, you can link it to your iPad and it will be able to send and receive SMS messages.

Use Continuity to connect your Mac, iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Apple Watch - Apple Support

SMS and MMS messages are a feature of cellular telephone voice service. They are transmitted on the same channel as a telephone voice connection using bandwidth unused by voice communication. They do not use the internet at all

By design, an iPad is an internet data only device, whether it is capable of only WiFi connections to the internet, or both WiFi and cellular data connections to the internet. An iPad cannot connect to any cellular telephone service voice network at all. Thus it cannot send nor receive anything but internet based messages, such as Apple’s iMessage service or Skype, Google hangouts, etc.

Apple’s proprietary and free iMessage service is an internet based service, and one that Apple only offers to their customers using Apple hardware and software. Note that other internet messaging services also require both sender and recipient to be using the same app and service (again, e.g. Skype, Google Hangouts, etc).

All smart phones and any cell phone in the last nearly 20 years, as long as it has cellular telephone service and an active text messaging account, can send at least SMS texts. MMS texts use SMS for the text portion and cellular data for the image, video, etc portion. So any cell phone (smart or not) can use SMS.

SMS is actually a very old protocol, and also quite limited in its capabilites since it using a small unused portion of the cellular telephone voice bandwidth. While it is ubiquitous to cellular telephone voice service, it cannot offer the same features as internet based messaging services (trivia - the origins of SMS predate the internet by over a decade, going back to the early 1980s).

Namelessipad wrote:

Thank you. I appreciate your assistance

Hope it helped!