When the devastating EF-5 tornado smashed through Newcastle and Moore, Oklahoma on Monday afternoon, 20th of May, 2013, destroying everything in its path, taking 24 lives and injuring scores more, still it could have been much worse. The National Weather Service issued the initial tornado warning a full 36 minutes before the tornado began to cross through Moore. This type of lead-time saves lives and people in the Plains states – “Tornado Alley” – certainly pay heed to these warnings.
SMS
Yesterday, Apple’s well-used iMessage OTT messaging service crashed, starting at approximately 3:15 PM EDT (US) and the outage continued for over 5 hours. As iOS (mostly iPhone) texters began seeing their text balloons turn green, rather than blue, Twitter began heavily trending #iMessage tweets as a result of the outage.
You can’t deny that this industry is evolving and changing – almost on a daily basis. From new apps to new devices and new networks as well as increasingly social networks, we should expect increased competition, as well as increasingly disruptive technologies to permeate the industry. In the coming days, SAP Mobile Services will be offering a new guide for the modern service provider — one that will outline the opportunities and detail many solutions that exist in this exciting and diverse market.
When some signficiant event occurs somewhere in the world, regardless of it being a local, regional, or global event, it can and does affect text messaging to and from that locale. Why is this? Does SMS work when a simple “pick-up-the-phone-and-call” does not?
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.
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.
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
Mobile messaging, especially SMS-based messaging, has seen a resurgence of usage in the US market; however, it is not necessarily carrier-based SMS that has grown. There are a growing number of messaging apps and services that have been launched and announced, and services such as iMessage are just around the corner. This runs somewhat counter to recent industry and general press, were we’ve seen articles stating that “SMS is dead (or dying)” and that non-SMS “chat” services are displacing true, mobile-SMS interoperable services. Certainly, in some markets, non-SMS “chat” services have cannibalized some SMS revenues – especially outside of the USA and Canada, but in general mobile operator SMS (as we know it) is alive and well.