Submitted by Mike Grenville on Wed, 29 Oct 2008 11:36

The Q3 quarterly MDA figures show the P2P SMS is still growing 38% year on year in the UK.

Based on the Network Operators’ actual usage figures, The Mobile Data Association (MDA) quarterly figures for UK mobile phone activity from July - September 2008 for SMS and MMS shows strong growth in both formats.

New devices and an ever growing variety of mobile applications have driven overall growth figures in 2008. SMS growth continues to astound growing 38% from the same period last year while multi-media messages shows an increasing level of growth up 20%, albeit with volumes at a very different much lower level to SMS. Consumer awareness, the fact that nearly all phones now come ready configured to work with MMS and attractive tariff bundles from the Mobile Network Operators helps fuel this growth.

Q3 2007 analysis compared to Q3 2008

In 2006 the daily average of P2P SMS in the UK was 100 million a day. The latest MDA figures show that Britons are now sending almost 217 million per day. This up by 38% and is on average 60 million more messages a day compared to the same period in 2007.

This adds up to over 1.5 billion messages a week or on average 6.5 billion text messages sent per month. Just a few years ago in 1999 the total was 1.1 billion for the whole year. This was the pivot moment for take up as the following year there were 6.1 billion messages which doubled the following year (100M a day - December 2005).

It continues to be clear that once people start using SMS, the usage continues to rise. By being installed and working on every phone is of course a great start, but a reliable network and attractive tarrifs play their part as well. But more than that, short text messages meets a daily need to exchange snipits of information of all kinds. Other message formats have to compete with something that is not only installed on almost 4 billion phones around the world but continues to find more ways to be used.

Rather than persuing 'the next big thing' in messaging that requires significant investment and efforts to persuade users, operators are begining to realise that they already have something that meets users needs. Examples of this are O2's Bluebook (one of our award winners this year) and Acision’s Message Plus that was winner of the 2007 Mobile Messaging Awards ‘Best Consumer Service’ that is in use by Maxis’ mobile subscribers who use it to block unwanted SMS, set up automatic replies and automatically copy messages to another mobile number – all from their handset.

The UK Q3 2008 statistics in full

All the MDA data is compiled and aggregated with the input and support of UK mobile operators O2, Vodafone, T-Mobile, 3, Orange and Virgin Mobile. SMS statistics are UK MO (mobile originated) person-to-person figures and excludes any aggregator or other premium rate numbers. Unfortunately these figures are not published