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A field once driven by Europe's mobile youth, text messaging is finally catching on in the US, according to new figures from Cingular Wireless.
New statistics from Cingular, the second largest mobile operator in the US, claim that traffic from Short Message Services (SMS) has increased more than 450 percent since the summer of 2001. Moreover there has been a 50 percent jump since October alone.
According to Cingular the large growth in traffic was largely stimulated by the introduction of services like mobile originated messaging, SMS to e-mail, ringtones, games and sweepstakes. "This growth in SMS traffic on the Cingular network is testimony to how quickly data is growing in popularity in the US," said Bill Clift, chief technical officer of Cingular.
Worldwide more than 12 billion short messages are sent each month via PCs, cell phones and personal digital assistants. Cell phones alone are responsible for 750 million messages each day, says the GSM Association.
It is estimated that as many as 70 percent of all mobile phone users in Europe use SMS, while 39 percent of Japan's mobile phone subscribers use short messaging services. But in the US consumers have been less enthusiastic to embrace the technology, with only 12 percent of the estimated 123 million mobile phone users in the US using SMS, according to A.T. Kearney, a market research firm.
The figures that operators like Cingular focus on most are those related to revenues. Revenues from SMS for some European carriers already represent more than 10 percent of service revenues. But US carriers on the other hand can only claim around two percent of non-voice revenues.
Historically part of the reason for the low usage in the US was that many carriers only started offering two-way messaging services last year. Moreover, many of the handsets in the US market were not equipped to send messages until recently. AT&T Wireless, the first company to offer SMS in the United States, began its two-way messaging service as late as October 2000.
But technical problems also abound. The US wireless field is a mix of differing standards and technologies which until recently made it very difficult for users to send a message from one carrier to another. Using technology from Virginia-based InphoMatch Inc, AT&T Wireless in November gave its subscribers the ability to send and receive messages on any network, for the first time.
Nevertheless Americans are not entirely voice centric. US users have been keen to send other kinds of data messages besides SMS. E-mail can in fact be sent from one user to another without the need to be on the same network. Moreover IM or instant messing is becoming a more popular application in the wireless space, with AT&T Wireless announcing last week that it would give users the ability to communicate over AOL's Instant Messenger (AIM).
"Messaging services, including instant messaging, text messaging, and e-mail, will become a defining consumer wireless data application in 2002," claimed John Bunyan, senior vice president of AT&T Wireless mobile multimedia services.
"The issue with America is that the PC culture is established," said Paul Collins of A.T. Kearney. "But I think once they understand the difference between messaging and e-mail, it will really start to take off....America has a long way to go to catch up with Europe, but there has been growth all around in the market."
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