Samuel Langhorne Clemens 1835 – 1910
“The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” Samuel Langhorne Clemens: Mark Twain
The wisdom is that SMS is dead or dying due to Over the Top messaging players like WhatsApp, Viber, BlackBerry Messenger, Apple iMessage and Facebook Messenger. Well SMS might be a simple service massively overpriced considering its cost of production but dead or dying it is not. Industry source Portio’s founder and MD Karl Whitfield claims that world SMS revenues are going up and will top $133 billion in 2013. He says:
Since the early days of SMS in the 1990s to today, in mid-2013, SMS revenue worldwide has gone UP every single year. So far, the operator community has not “lost” anything. From 2013 to 2017 inclusive, SMS revenue worldwide will remain above 2010 levels, hardly an industry ravaged by new threats and killer competition. SMS will continue to generate over USD 100 billion per annum for at least the next five years.
In Australia ACMA reports that 36 billion SMS’s were sent in the year to June 2011 up 23% form the previous year while Telstra says SMS’s on its network have gone from 1 billion to 12 billion between 2002 and 2012.
An SMS comprises a maximum of 1,120 bits so if data were charged at the current SMS rate of 25 cents then 1GB of data which is typically provided on smartphone plans today for around $10 would cost $1.8M. It makes international roaming data charges of typically 1.5c per KB or $15,000 per GB look like a bargain.