SMS still serves as number one for global communities

Tom Veldman, Director Product Marketing, Acision

It was announced last month that over one billion messages are being sent in a single day via WhatsApp. Such OTT services are increasingly being cited as spearheading the next wave of mobile messaging communications and in turn putting pressure on traditional SMS. Despite these new messaging services increasing in popularity, SMS still serves the needs of a global community of over 5 billion mobile subscribers compared with the multitude of fragmented OTT communities which are restricted to smartphone users equipped with the right clients. Over 6 trillion SMS messages are sent globally per year. If you calculate that to traffic per day, this is 15 billion on average, and peak days such as New Year’s may well see SMS volumes increase to 100 billion.

While the rapid introduction of OTT messaging services has brought innovation in messaging capabilities and attractive charging models, they are also fundamentally fragmenting the messaging landscape. Recent statistics from comScore indicated that smartphone penetration in Europe is currently less than 40 per cent, and even less in other parts of the world. This, and the lack of interoperability between OTT services, means that such services are isolating the majority of the market.

The ubiquity of SMS, on the other hand, offers a number of unique advantages. Firstly, a reach of more than 5 billion people globally across any brand, network and device type, even without 3G. Also, the telco grade SMS infrastructure deployed around the globe ensures uncompromised quality and availability. For businesses, this has the unique value of reaching everybody as well as being the most secure and reliable method of communication, making it highly suitable for enterprise and machine-to-machine communications. What’s more is that SMS is still evolving  with premium, personalised service enhancements for the consumer and enterprise being offered from within the cloud. The rich communication services being introduced by mobile operators, such as RCS-e, are building on these strengths, leveraging SMS to ensure interoperability with all mobile users, providing a reach of 5 billion mobile users from day 1 of introducing these new services., RCS-e incorporates OTT-esque features, such as multi-media file transfer and threaded conversation views, providing mobile operators a service evolution which will enable them to provide the best possible mobile messaging experience to all users.

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