Popularity of SMS

Short message services are developing very fastly throughout the world. In the middle of 2004 texts were sent at the rate of five hundred billion messages each year. At cost of USD is 0.10 per message, this generated revenues in over of 50 billion for mobile telephone operators and represented near by 100 text messages for each and every person in the world. SMS is mostly popular in Europe, Asia (excluding Japan) and Australia.  SMS is very popular, in China and has brought significant profit to the service providers. (In, 2001 eighteen billion short messages were send)

Europe ranks next after Asia in popularity of SMSing. In the year 2003, 16 billion messages were sent every month at an average. In Spain users send 50 messages per moth at an average. The cost of sending an SMS varies as £0.03–£0.18 depending on their payment plans in these type of countries. France have not taken SMSing in the same way, 20 messages per month was an average.

In  USA, however, the demand of SMS is even more limited. Though the SMS usually costs only US$0.05 , only 13 messages were sent by the average user in 2003.

It is an increasing trend towards spamming mobile phone users by SMS has given service carriers to action against the practice, before the problem spreads every where. Not any of spamming incidents relating SMS have been reported as of October 2003, but the exist of the mobile phones spam has been noted already by industry watchdogs, including Consumer Reports magazine.