Future of SMS

According to the MDA 16.8 billion chargeable person-to-person text messages were sent across the four UK GSM networks in 2002.  This year the MDA say that we can expect to witness the continued growth of SMS with an expected 55 million messages to be sent a day. But with the introduction of extended SMS services and MMS what else is in store for text messaging in 2003?  Mike Short, vice president of O2 and chairman of the Mobile Data Association (MDA) gives us his take on the future of text messaging.v

The future will see service providers and phone manufacturers looking at new ways of creating a greater variety and range of texting services. For example Multimedia Messaging Services (MMS) will allow the consumer to add sounds, images and video to their text messages. In order for the new technology to be adopted consumers will need to upgrade their mobile phones and ensure their friends and family have compatible hand-sets. The network infrastructure needs to be developed further and pricing for the service and hand-sets needs to be agreed by operators and service providers. Broad adoption of MMS is not expected to take place before 2005.

While MMS will undoubtedly permit completely new ways of messaging, in terms of type and variety of content, it is predicted to act as an enhancement to the existing text messaging service.

There will be more ways to send and receive text messages in the future, for example dedicated web sites or business intranets as well as mobile phones. Furthermore text messaging will become more cost effective as bundled tariffs and free text services are promoted by the service providers.

Partnerships with television, radio, advertisers, news sites, public sector agencies, celebrity and band promoters, for example will create a larger range of interactive text based services. Interactive participation between audience/ mobile phone owners and broadcasters (business and commercial) is set to rise.  Recent examples of this are Channel 4's Big Brother, BBC's Fame Academy and ITV's Popstars.  All three programmes utilised interactive text voting, pulling in millions of votes per night.

As the younger generations (the biggest users of text messaging) grow-up they will take their texting skills with them. They will continue to educate the older generations and will also pass on their skills to their children and grand children. Text messaging will become embedded into generations of family and friends.

The MDA's Professional Text Messaging Report has also found that more and more businesses are adopting text messages as a way of communicating with their customers. The report adds that the accelerated growth of applications developed to promote the use of text as a business tool will cause an explosion of business and professional text. Yet still in its infancy, profits to be made from business and professional text are there for the taking.

Once the mobile data service has evolved to a point where it offers greater mass-customisation to meet business customer needs, it stands a much better chance of creating an explosion in business data usage to match the consumer SMS text explosion seen from 2000 to 2002.  A good starting point for growing this understanding of what services are best suited to the corporate business market is to establish contact and ally more closely with the trade organisations that exist for the corporate market, rather than expect the corporate market to find valuable time and deploy resources, to gain a deeper understanding of the mobile data world.

 

Mike concludes that the future of text messaging looks healthy. Text messaging has increased three-fold over the last two years. The MDA has predicted that for 2003 20 billion text messages across the UK will be sent. The expectation is that consumer mobile-to-mobile text would continue to grow, particularly with the introduction of common short codes and m-commerce enabled premium rate services content. It has also forecast that the growth of business text would be significant with the addition of more Intranet PC SMS text diallers.

It is also clear within the messaging market that the introduction of other messaging services, 2.5G and 3G technology, such as packet radio (GPRS), Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) and MMS, will add more capability for customers wishing to develop non-voice messaging as a tool and a service.