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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.
Consumers are becoming more and more comfortable
with the use of their mobile phones as a device
for communicating with their friends, colleagues
and family. Over 70% of mobile phone users now
use their hand-sets for text messaging. Services
such as sports results, betting games and stock
market news sent directly to mobile phones and a
better quality of hand-sets (colour, displays
and accessories) have helped fuel the growth in
texting. Text messaging is seen as a medium of
choice - being simple, cost effective, instant
discrete, fashionable and transparent to use
with ubiquitous coverage.
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.
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