Pakistan has seen a remarkable growth in SMS traffic during the past few years and only in three months of 2010,(from July to September 2010), 48,846 million text messages were exchanged thus generating the revenue of the country, revealed a report of Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) on Friday.
Besides this, Pakistan had the largest text messaging growth in Asia Pacific in the Y2008/09, which is growing with the same rate, due to its low cost as compared to voice tariffs and bundle packages are being offered by the operators.
With Pakistan's 763 million messages sent during the festive seasons, the top five countries with the highest SMS traffic processed over the festive season were the Philippines, again leading the ranking with 2.36 billion messages, closely followed by Indonesia (1.193 billion), Malaysia (1.075 billion) and Pakistan (763 million).
Fact is that all the operators in Pakistan are offering very attractive SMS-bundle packages and approximately 80 percent of the total SMS traffic is exchanged over these bundle packages and rest 20 percent on flat rate of Re.1/sms. According to official data available, an average bundle package of 700- SMS/month is approximately for Rs 60 and keeping in mind these two rates, the revenue for SMS-traffic is calculated to be approximately 40.76 billion.
In terms of year-on-year growth, Pakistan SMS text traffic volume grew by 253 percent compared to last year during the same period. SMS traffic increased by 149 percent from 2008 to 2009 and in Y2009 alone, 128 messages per head per month were sent, against the subscriber base of 99 million.
When contacted, PTA Spokesman Khurram Mehran said this SMS count proved why it remained one of operators' strongest data revenue stream. Much of the consistent growth of SMS was due to its ever-widening adoption beyond peer-to-peer messaging such as banking, social networking, enterprise applications, advertising and machine-to-machine communication, he maintained.
For instance, Juniper research recently revealed that global mobile banking services will be generating 90 billion text messages per annum by 2015, as banks seek to utilise SMS as a means of enhancing customer communications and services.
Pakistan, despite its low income, seems to be most ready for 3G and other broadband applications because of its subscriber's agility and adeptness in using their mobile phones for data applications. Some experts foresee the texting to die out with coming of 3G but yet, unless costs of service and handsets go down, texting, up to some extent will remain the main mode of communication for many Pakistanis.
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