1,000 Billion SMS in 2004

Source: 160characters.org

Is SMS the Cinderella of the mobile industry? Set for huge growth in 2005, 160c asked analysts for their estimate of the number of P2P SMS in 2004 and their predictions for SMS volumes for the year ahead

Next week 3GSM in Cannes will see many dazzling new technologies on display, but how many stands will have interesting new SMS services? Based on my previous experience the answer likley to be 'hardly any'. So few in fact that SMS could be called the Cinderella of the mobile industry - doing all the work, providing most of the revenues, still full of potential but not getting the recognition it deserves.

Indeed it wasn't so long ago that it was said that the peak of SMS growth had already been reached and would shortly be overtaken by the rapid rise of MMS. Now two years after the launch of MMS, it is still hard to get figures for usage and when they do come in they do not compare beside the numbers and continuing growth of SMS.
SMS Set For Growth In 2005
While China is said to have sent 217.75 billion SMS in 2004 and the UK 26.135 billion, how many were sent worldwide? Figures are not tallied but John Delaney, Analyst at Ovum, says that their current estimate for the number of text messages sent worldwide in 2004 is around 960 billion.

Matt Hatton of the Yankee Group says that their estimates for P2P SMS traffic in Western Europe alone is 127 billion. Yankee predict that this will rise to 136 billion in 2005 reaching a peak of 146 billion in 2006.

Ovum forecast that worldwide 1,360 billion SMS will be sent in 2005.

Informa's Steve Mayall says that "By the end of 2005 the annual number of SMS sent in the world could pass the 1000 billion mark, up to half of which might come from China."

"The long term outlook for SMS is positive" says Mayall. "Its continuing growth, its current value to the industry, and its wide penetration and acceptance among mobile subscribers assures its future for the next three to five years."

Mayall reckons that "A2P SMS will begin to fall from 2005 in mature markets, and may not achieve mass market status in emerging regions such as the U.S. Alternative bearers will instead leapfrog this delivery method, and the increasing efficiency of MMS and sophistication of alternative billing models will slowly erode WAP push and premium SMS."

Whether MMS will reach the efficiency, reliability, volume capacity and price point for it to take over as a delivery method in 2005 is questionable.
Six Reasons Why Text Messaging Will Grow – Says Telsis
Global text messaging volumes and revenues will continue to grow for the foreseeable future in defiance of gloomy predictions by some industry observers.

That’s the up-beat view of Jeff Wilson, chairman of text and voice infrastructure developer Telsis www.telsis.com who says analysts expecting a fall-off in texting volumes are ignoring six key growth-driving factors.

* Demographics – texting will expand into new groups as today’s text-savvy youngsters grow older. The new generation of teenagers will continue to use text because it is cheap, fast and discrete.
* The expanding mobile community – the number of GSM subscribers is set to double to 2 billion. New users will catch the texting habit.
* Advanced network services – new text services such as divert, copy and alpha-addressing will stimulate more usage by both businesses and individuals.
* New text applications – new applications such as national-scale participation TV will generate huge text volumes. A five-minute voting period in the UK could easily attract five million votes with gross revenue of over £1 million.
* SMS for customer care – text will become a regular part of customer-care programmes. Text wizards can already recognise natural-language questions and automatically fire back answers.
* MMS growth – far from replacing text, MMS will actually grow it because every MMS message is underpinned by up to two text messages. Meanwhile people will continue to use text when speed, cost and privacy are important.

“There’s no doubt that the visionary networks now equipping and tuning their networks for continuing growth in text will reap a major new slice of revenue,” says Jeff Wilson. “Operators late to the table will swap-out their legacy SMSCs as they go end of life, replacing them with next-generation Intelligent SMS Routing technology for unprecedented reliability, throughput and processing. They too will then have the ability to exploit the exciting new applications that will deliver volume and revenue growth.”