ISLAMABAD: Mobile phone users in the country have exchanged a startling 301.7 billion SMS messages during one year (July 2013 to June 2014).
This means the subscribers exchanged around 800 million text messages per day.
A comparison of last two years have showed that total SMS traffic during Fiscal Year 2014 decreased five per cent as compared to what we had in 2013, showing that mobile messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Viber, Line and Facebook are making an impact.
Similarly, an average SMS per cellular subscriber in a month also reduced to 180 as compared to 214 last year.
According to stats the rising trend of smartphones coupled with increased use of mobile internet, Over the Top (OTT) and social media applications have reduced the dependency on traditional communication modes (voice and SMS) into reduced number of SMS exchanges over cellular mobile networks.
It is only the matter of time that voice and SMS revenues are going to get a serious hit and to get replaced by data revenues.
Clearly it is the time now that cellular operators need to start drawing their future strategies around data services.
