SMS still going strong after 22 years

SMS still going strong after 22 years

Today marks the 22nd anniversary of the first ever SMS and despite growing concerns that revenues from the service are in decline, many in the industry are still keeping the faith.

Facts and figures clearly state that person-to-person (P2P) messaging is decreasing in the Western world, but with the rise of application-to-person (A2P) messaging, it is by no means a declining service area.

“The 22-year old SMS is doing very well and will continue to enjoy a healthy future for at least another 10 years, regardless of the growth of OTT messaging applications” said Bart Vandekerckhove, head of mobile messaging at BICS.

“This will be driven by the growth in A2P messaging and enterprises’ need for a reliable, ubiquitous technology to communicate with their customers wherever they are in the world.”

OTT players are experiencing enormous success with internet-based messaging services, but only SMS can operate on any mobile device regardless of the operating system, geography and level of network evolution.

“OTT services cannot offer the same reach and reliability for large enterprises as SMS – which works seamlessly on legacy systems,” Vandekerckhove said.

“No matter how big the OTT communities are, the largest community will always be the mobile community with almost seven billion users worldwide.”

Analysts at Ovum expect that over 7.6 trillion SMS messages will be sent worldwide in 2015.

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