14 DAY TRIAL // A new research showed that people in the UK send more than 1 billion text messages every week. That means 4,000 messages sent every second and huge revenues for operators.
These recent surveys reveal the oddest things. UK's Mobile Data Association (MDA) reached the result of 1.2 billion text messages per week. This is more than what they used to send during the entire year of 1999 and also shows a 25 percent growth compared to last year. The British SMS sending has also seen some records, all surpassed in time, as the huge numbers now refer to smaller periods of time. Last year, in May, it seemed mind-blowing to see that the Brits sent 3.3 billion text messages only in May. Now, this should mean a regression.
"The UK text volumes show no real signs of abating and the UK sits within the top six of the Global league of countries sending text messages. While the trend towards operators offering 'all-you-can-eat' tariffs increases, this will act as a catalyst for consumer's passion for all things mobile", said Mike Short, Chairman, The Mobile Data Association.
The growth of the number of text messages sent by people in the UK shows no signs of regression. During September 2007, a total of almost 5,000 billion text messages have been sent. The MDA forecasts that the number will increase even further in Britain. Still, it's not as profitable as it seems and as operators might like it to be.
"Even if SMS traffic keeps growing at current rates into the future, mobile operators can't rely on revenues from SMS growing at the same pace. Part of the reason why people are still increasing their usage of SMS is that the effective price per message is going down", commented John Delaney of Ovum.
A solution for keeping revenues up high would be that of coming up with another killer application that would surpass the SMS in popularity. That's a difficult task to achieve, especially as the text message has been around for as long as we can remember and is a basic mobile phone service that only few people do not use.