A few days ago, BBC News published: “Payments by text message service to launch in UK in Spring 2014.” I found this story fascinating – not that payments may be made by text message, as it’s been done for years in various markets such as in Kenya. One can also send money via smartphones, using apps, today as well. No, what is fascinating is that text messaging is once again the bearer of this payment information.
Author: William Dudley
For the sixth consecutive year, I am happy and honored to offer my 2013 mobile industry predictions, along with a review of how well I did for 2012. This year has been another banner year for mobile: Everything from Apple news to networks (LTE deployments and RCS as well) to mobile commerce. Today, an ever-increasing number of subscribers are using smartphones and that is a growing, worldwide phenomenon. In fact, in many markets, smartphone penetration has exceeded 50% and continues to grow.
On November 6th, 2012, we broadcast a webinar via webinars.telecoms.com. This was well attended and generated a large number of questions. While I responded to the questions on the webinar site, I thought it would be useful to pull these questions and answers together in this blog entry.
I am quite excited to see LTE support in the new iPhone 5 and global LTE support, at that. Currently there are actually three versions that are launching…
If Ofcom (“the Independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries”) needed any more evidence of the texting behaviors of UK consumers, the London 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremonies provided a perfect forum for texting, before, during and especially after the fantastic Danny Boyle directed extravaganza.
Since Sybase 365 has a unique role in delivering inter-carrier traffic between mobile operators, around the world, we can use statistics from that data to provide very accurate estimates of texting (or SMS) traffic around the world. For the Olympics, we were and are watching. For the record, my SAP DB colleagues would note that I would be amiss if I did not mention that all SMS traffic data is powered by SAP Sybase IQ. That said; let’s take a look at some macro, hourly data:
Opening Ceremonies Graphic 2
The graph shows the SMS traffic departure from “normal” based on UK subscribers sending Mobile Originated messages. As you can clearly see, SMS traffic grows steeply as the ceremony begins, peaks, and then the departure from normal AFTER the event tops 80% between midnight and 1am! These are times when normal SMS traffic begins to decline to much lower nighttime volumes. However, in the early morning hours of the 28th, there was a lot of reaction throughout the wee hours until 5-6AM when things leveled off. The Olympics kickoff was quite the exciting event and the residual SMS traffic clearly shows that reaction. I should note at this point, we reviewed SMS traffic from other countries as well, but none were even close in terms of overall statistical significance as a result of the opening ceremonies.
We also looked more detailed 10-minute intervals of UK MO traffic over the three days: Friday, Saturday and Sunday (July 27th-29th). In this graphic, you can clearly see “normal” traffic on Saturday and Sunday, contrasted with Friday’s build up to the opening ceremonies. As we are looking at the 28th and 29th, it is evident that none of the athletic events generated enough overall interest to cause a statistically relevant up-tick in the SMS traffic, but the Opening Ceremonies generated significant traffic surges.
Opening Ceremonies – Detailed v.1.0
As you can see from the key events on the graphic, the SMS traffic is either very reactionary or anticipatory to certain events. For example, there was a significant text boost in the 10-20 minutes prior to the British team’s arrival in the stadium.
SMS, as a Person-to-Person communications method is clearly still an extremely popular medium. Despite significant impacts from OTT players as well as iMessage (which is really not measured here), I expected some SMS-based reaction, but not as much as was seen. Certainly Twitter is today’s medium to comment, post, and discuss events such as this; however, SMS remains the preferred, personal communications medium between individuals.
We, as a consumer society, are increasingly becoming “mail-order,” or more precisely, online patrons. Online (and Mobile Friendly) mega-sites such as Amazon, Ebay, Overstock.com, and many more specialty retailers are putting increasing pressure on traditional brick and mortar shops. Certainly as all of the successful online retail sites offer mobile-friendly websites all the way to advanced apps and mobile-based customer outreach, using multiple channels, mobile shopping is quickly gaining as the preferred method to buy online.
Plumbing may seem like a strange word in a telecoms focused blog – especially one that highlights Long Term Evolution or LTE. Still, that’s what it is. Plumbing moves something from one place to another – typically through pipes. In the plumbing that we all rely on, water or gas is moved to faucets, heaters, cooktops and other other appliances. In the mobile telecom world, we have new and shiny LTE networks being deployed around the world. To move all of that data between these high speed network island, we need plumbing – and that plumbing is called an IPX. Peter Bernstein put it this way in his article: LTE and Roaming – Sybase 365 Leading the Charge: “Let’s face it, plumbing is not sexy.”
The 2012 Mobile World Congress is now in the history books. All of the 60,000+ delegates have returned home with renewed excitement about this multi-trillion dollar industry and the energy generated at this annual ritual of the mobile industry.
No, this won’t be a 2012 type prediction of Armageddon! But the mobile industry has begun the inevitable and likely irrevocable evolution towards an all IP ecosystem. This also means that services – basic services such as voice and messaging have already begun to go IP – or “over-the-top” (OTT) ahead of equivalent offerings from the network providers themselves.
Worldwide, texting is a very personal activity – not withstanding the texting to short codes and receiving responses or alerts, roughly 90% of texting worldwide is to another person. Globally, we still see SMS (or texting) growing. Our global statistics continue to show worldwide SMS traffic growing, but certainly slowing