[photopress:sms_1.jpg,full,alignright]According to Digital Life, the Internet Report launched by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), mobile phone messaging boasts a global industry generating some $80 billion in annual revenue.
Which is amazing for a relatively young industry — 12 years old if you want to be very generous. The idea of SMS, mobile phone messaging, was being discussed as early as February 1985 within what is now called the ITU which was then called the CCITT which stood for something in French. (If you insist it is Comité Consultatif International Téléphonique et Télégraphique.)
Those were discussions. But the first SMS transfer of information came on December 3, 1992 and this was on the Vodafone network in Britain. It went from PC to cell phone. The text of the message — telecommunications people are not good on historic, epic messages — was Merry Christmas.
The first cellphone originated SMS came the following year from Nokia. It was sent by Riku Pihkonen, an engineer student at Nokia and no one is quite sure what it said.
By 1995 SMS was commercially available but the numbers were nowhere. One figure given is an average of 0.4 messages per GSM phone per month. But it grew and in the UK by the end of 2000 it was up to 35 messages a month.
In the following year there were 250 billion text messages and by 2004 this had doubled which meant that close to 100 text messages were being sent for every person alive in the world.
In the Philippines, champion text messaging country of the world, the average per day is 10-12 text messages a day per person per phone which is about 400 million for the country. This is more than all the SMS of European countries, the United States and China combined. This imbalance is changing as other the rate in other countries eases up.
The current ITU report, Digital Life, shows that cell phone messaging takes off faster in developing countries than in developed economies. Thus the Philippines, India and China right up there close to the top.
An informal survey among university students in Sydney found that the staggering average was 32 SMS messages a day.
Source: Xinhua and research.