One tends to find, almost all the time, someone within their sight texting, or "SMSing" if you will. Social interactions also indicate that Pakistanis, of varying backgrounds and age cohorts, are savvy users of the short messaging service. A service which was supposed to get ones point across instantly and in a few short words quickly became a pastime and a hobby for many. In Pakistan, too, with the phenomenal rise in mobile teledensity and a ceaseless churn of dirt-cheap sms packages, the unruly sms traffic has breached quite many a signal of late. The telecom regulator recently published a report which contains interesting insights regarding the sms flow in Pakistan. Titled "SMS Report 2011", the report emphatically states that Pakistanis generated a whopping 175.4 billion sms between January and December 2010, 24 billion more than CY09. By taking the 102.78 million cellular subscribers at December-end 2010 as the base, the PTA report estimates that on an average, every mobile subscriber sent roughly 5 sms every day. These calculations are based on the assumption that the "bundled" sms offers are subscribed by 80 percent of users, while the rest 20 percent of the subscribers send text messages on "flat" rates. Based on minimum bundled and flat rates advertised in 2010, each sms cost, on an average, 12.8 paisa to the users. Hence, the total sms revenue in 2010 was estimated at approximately Rs.22.5 billion. Out of this, Rs.14.6 billion came from sms sent on flat rates because they are relatively expensive, whereas somewhat low Rs.6.66 billion came from sms via bundled rates which are attractive yet very cheap. The number of international sms sent from Pakistan during 2010 was very low, at just 32.04 million. Being much expensive than local service, these sms contributed Rs.1.5 billion to the overall sms revenue figure. According to Portio Research, a UK-based telecom research company, the heavy-texting Pakistani market ranked sixth in terms of sms traffic in Asia-Pacific, only behind China, the Philippines, Indonesia, India and Japan, in 2010. The Asia-Pacific contributed over two-fifth of global person-to-person sms traffic in 2010, by generating around 3 trillion sms and grossing $45.2 billion in sms revenue. In Pakistans case, it must be mentioned that since only seventy to eighty percent of total subscribers are "active" users, the sms generation per user may be higher than 5 sms per day. Nonetheless, such large local sms traffic is incredible, and the upcoming data for CY11 may show even larger sms volume as the operators came up with yet new sms campaigns and advertised heavily throughout the outgoing year. There is a need to tap into the huge sms market to provide "real" and customised value-added services to the customers to make their routine life tasks hassle-free and seamless. The PTA report also underscores the need for attractive VAS to sustain sms growth, and highlights areas like application-to-person and person-to-application sms services, m-commerce, e-government, m-health and mobile payments. Going forward, PTA should look into recording and disseminating insightful information like demographic trends in sms usage. Sms may be cheap, but there is a cost to it. And that is why the regulator must take punitive measures to fix the sms spam issue, for which operators are also responsible to an extent.
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