ISLAMABAD: Pakistan has seen a stunning and remarkable growth in both, the mobile subscriber base and the Short Message Service (SMS) traffic during the past few years and it seems to be ready for 3G and other broadband applications. Advertising seems to act as an attractive potential driver for SMS traffic, and it demands on the operators to support the end-to-end campaign management and reporting requirements of media buyers and advertisers.
All the operators have offered very attractive SMS-bundle packages and approximately 80 percent of the total SMS traffic is exchanged over bundle packages and rest of the 20 percent on flat rates of Rs1/sms.
An average bundle package of 700 SMS/month is approximately for Rs60.According to these two rates, the revenue for SMS traffic is calculated to be approximately 40.76 billion.
Talking to APP, Spokesman Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) said "in 2008/09, Pakistan had the largest text messaging growth in Asia Pacific."
He further said Pakistan is one of the top five countries with the highest SMS traffic processed over the festive season, the five countries were the Philippines, leading the ranking with 2.36 billion messages, closely followed by Indonesia (1.193 billion), Malaysia (1.075 billion) and Pakistan (763 million).
In terms of year-on-year growth, Pakistan's SMS text traffic volume grew by 253 percent compared to last year during the same period.
Much of the consistent growth of SMS is due to its ever widening adoption beyond peer-to-peer messaging such as banking, social networking, enterprise applications, advertising and machine-to-machine communications.
For instance, Juniper Research recently revealed that global mobile banking services will be generating 90 billion text messages per annum by 2015, as banks seeks to utilize SMS as a means of enhancing customer communication and services.
Some experts foresee texting (SMS) to die out with coming of 3G but yet, unless costs of service and handsets go down, texting will to some extent remain the main mode of communication for many Pakistanis.
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