Text messaging used to lord over the Telecommunications business. During those days were Androids and iPhones were still at the planning stages, the SMS was a key contributor to the popularity of cell phones and the boom of the industry.
But according to Forbes, text messaging is now currently sliding out of the picture as a number of countries have reported a decline in texting over the 2011 holidays compared to other years during the same period.
M.G.I. Research senior analyst Tero Kuittinen said in a written statement to Forbes that during the Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, SMS messages were low compared to the previous year.
He said that, “it’s quite possible that the SMS erosion will hit AT&T and Verizon in 2012 or 2013. The fast fade of SMS usage in countries that were most obsessed with text-messaging tells us how difficult it is to project rates of decline of aging technologies – and how unfaithful consumers can be to services that they have loyally used for 15 years.”
Finland was also included in the list as Sonera, Finland’s top carrier, said that there was a 22% decline in text messaging during the holidays of 2010 and 2011.
Individuals attribute the decline of SMS to social networking and free messaging services over the Internet.
Though there is a rapid decline in text-messaging, people are still not giving it up completely.
Image credit: Bgr.com/Todd Haselton
While I don’t think I’ll ever give up texting completely, I have definitely been texting less than I used, especially compared to when I was in college. I use Kik and the new Apple Messenger, which I guess is still technically texting, but those aren’t billed as a text by the service company (Verizon for me), so I guess that’s probably what a lot of carriers are noticing. Plus, I even Tweet/DM some folks before texting them as well.
@JMattHicks Yeah, most of that is probably due to the fact that we still use mobile alot in the US. Lets see how ATT and Verizon hold out by the end of the year.
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