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How popular are SMSes?

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Short message services are developing very rapidly throughout the world. By mid-2004 texts were being sent at a rate of 500 billion messages a year. At an average cost of 10 cents per message, this generates revenues in excess of 50 billion for mobile telephone operators and represents close to 100 text messages for every person in the world.

Short messages are particularly popular amongst young urbanites. In many markets, the service is comparatively cheap. For example, in Australia a message typically costs between 20 and 25 cents to send, compared to a voice call, which costs anywhere between 40 cents and $2 per minute. Despite the low cost to the consumer, the service is enormously profitable to the service providers.

The most frequent SMS users are found in south-east Asia. In Singapore, hundreds of messages can be sent per month for free, after which messages cost between SGD 0.05 and SGD 0.07 each to send. The same pricing format is followed in the Philippines where the average user sent 2,300 messages in 2003, making it the world's most avid SMS nation. SMS is a part in almost all marketing campaigns, advocacy, and entertainment. In fact, SMS is so inexpensive (messages cost PHP 1.00 (about USD 0.02) to send), influential, powerful and addictive for Filipinos that several local dotcoms like Chikka Messenger, GoFISH Mobile, and Bidshot now fully utilise SMS for their services.

Europe is second behind Asia in terms of the SMS popularity. In 2003, an average of 16 billion messages was sent each month. Users in Spain sent a little more than fifty messages per month on average in 2003. In Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom the figure was around 35-40 SMS messages per month. In each of these countries the cost of sending an SMS varies from as little as £0.03-£0.18 depending on the payment plan.

In the US, however, the appeal of SMS is even more limited. Although an SMS usually costs only five cents (many providers also offer monthly allotments), only 13 messages were sent by the average user in 2003. The reasons for this are varied--many users have unlimited "mobile-to-mobile" minutes, high monthly minute allotments or unlimited service. Moreover, push to talk services offer the instant connectivity of SMS and are typically unlimited

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