Text Messaging Decline?

According to an article written by Tero Kuittinen and published in Forbes, text messaging has shown a decline over the past few years around the world. Mobile carriers in Finland have seen significant drops on the biggest single day use of text messaging services, the eve of Christmas. On Christmas Eve of 2010, customers on Finland's most dominant carrier, Sonera, sent 10.9 million text messages, just one year later this number has dropped to 8.5 million. In other countries around the world where SMS text messaging grew rapidly and initially took off during the 1990's, such as the Netherlands and the Philippines, there have been an assumed switch from text messaging to social media, email, and IP-based messaging services. Possibly the countries that brought text messaging to a popular stage are leading the ones that will lead into future services.

In the United States, At&t and Verizon have yet to feel signifiant drops in usage, but are expected to feel some SMS erosion in the future. Some 20% of carrier earnings are from text messaging, thus if customers continue to find ways to circumvent text messaging plans, carriers will need to find ways to recapture these drops in revenue. Thus, expect higher data fees in the future.

I am rather surprised by this data. I use text messaging daily, along with my close friends and even my parents. I do see the advantages of services like Skype and AIM, but text messaging has the unique feature to reach directly to a phone, and by phone, any phone on any carrier. Unlike AIM or Skype, the person you are contacting must have the capabilities of data and apps/web-browser like you, thus your ability to communicate is lacking. With the surge of iPhone customers since 2007, services like iMessage, a service that connects iPhones, iPod Touches, and iPads use similar messaging services like SMS text messaging, only that they are transferred via data connection (EDGE, 3G, 4G, or Wi-Fi) instead of through a small range of frequencies on voice calls. In my opinion, the future of text messaging will be a seamless option service of text messaging and a form of internet based messaging. The network economics of reaching an entire pool of customers is key and having the service directly installed and readable on all phones is also paramount. I would expect Android to release a very similar feature as Apple has with iMessage within the next updates.

So question for my audience. Do you use text messaging and by guess how many texts do you send a day?

For more on this subject, visit this post on Forbes.