Until now, mobile messaging has not had the impact in the Western Hemisphere that it has in other markets but texting is becoming increasingly popular and by 2007, IDC estimates that US subscriber revenues from SMS and IM will grow to around $1.9 billion for each service.
Asia and Europe continue to lead the way in message deployment but there was a significant rise in SMS traffic in the US last year and the idea of the mobile phone as a voice-only device is becoming outmoded.
“SMS subscribership doubled to more than 21 million subscribers in 2002 and wireless users have very strong interest in both SMS and IM,” said Scott Ellison, a senior figure in IDC’s Wireless and Mobile Communications research programme. “Wireless users are discovering the utility of wireless capabilities like SMS and IM, which in turn represent a natural migration of existing communications behaviour from the PC to wireless environments.”
Recent research has shown that there is considerable enthusiasm for emerging mobile data services (see Mobile Data Finding Favour In The US) and the number of person to person text messages sent last year increased by more than 300% to 2.4 billion.
However, the nascent status of the American SMS market is demonstrated by the fact that a total of 17 billion messages were sent across the four UK GSM networks in 2002 (see Text Messaging Hits A New High In 2002). US operators have since taken steps to raise the profile of their data services and text messaging has become a popular method of voting on interactive TV shows such as American Idol.
The mobile industry is also keen to exploit the potential of instant messaging in the business community. IDC maintains that lessons can be learned from the SMS subscriber market which doubled in size after the mid-2002 implementation of interoperability by the major US wireless carriers.
By 2007, it is estimated that there will be 75 million SMS subscribers and 63 million IM subscribers in the US.
