A total of 1.53 billion person to person text messages were sent across the UK’s four GSM networks during February, according to the latest figures from the Mobile Data Association (MDA).
The figures show that 78 million romantic text messages were sent on Valentine’s Day, taking the daily average for the month to 55 million, compared to 44 million in the same period the previous year and just 29 million in February 2001.
The MDA claims that SMS has become the “premier communications tool” of the millennium and with over 20 billion text messages expected to be sent in 2003, the growth of the medium looks set to continue.
Commenting on the figures, Mike Short, chairman of the MDA, said: “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 (MMS) services will allow the consumer to add sounds, images and video to their text messages.”
He added: “There will be more ways to send and receive text messages in the future, for example dedicated websites 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.”
A recent study from Continental Research suggests that around 20% of mobile phone users will soon have MMS-enabled handsets in the near future, providing advertisers with a potential market of 6.1 million consumers, capable of receiving multi-media marketing messages (see Multi-Media Messaging Shows Potential For Advertisers).
