Around 2 million person to person text messages were sent each hour during September bringing the monthly total to an all time high of £1.43bn, according to the latest figures from the Mobile Data Association
September’s figure takes the daily average of SMS messages sent across the UK’s four GSM network operators to 48 million, an increase of 12 million on the same period the previous year and almost 30 million on September 2000.
According to the MDA, September’s increase may be due to the return to college for many students, the majority of whom own a mobile phone and find text messaging an ideal way to communicate with friends and relatives.
The MDA relaunched its text.it website this week as part of its ongoing campaign to promote the use of text messages. Mike Short, chairman of the MDA, said: “The SMS initiative has been hugely successful due to operator collaboration through the SMS product managers and has provided a catalyst for growth allowing the text.it campaign to focus on areas such as the benefits of business text, trade information sources and the introduction of common short codes.”
The MDA will announce the first WAP figures next week, on behalf of the O2, Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone. The ‘WAP Operator’ initiative will issue monthly figures from October including number of WAP page impressions, WAP enabled handsets all supported by a dedicated WAP section within the text.it web site.
