I picked this up from a posting at the Silicon Investor discussion board by "Slacker 711" (sorry, Slacker, I would have wanted to post a comment for you there as well, but as the site requires registration, was just too much a hassle for a one-time comment; I enjoyed your discussion there).

Anyway, onto the latest US numbers on SMS. Slacker 711 points out that a new Gartner study says Americans are picking up the SMS text messaging habit. This is good news (and it was about time, I've ranted and raved about SMS to North American audiences since 2000 ha-ha, so now I can finally say "I told you so" ha-ha).

The Garner study is summarized at considerable degree at their website. It reports that for 2007, Gartner estimates 189 billion mobile messages sent by US mobile phone subscribers. Gartner says this includes mobile email (ie Blackberry etc) and mobile IM Instant Messaging, but according to Gartner "but it's very small compared with the uptake of SMS"  So we can safely assume the vast majority of the 189 B messages are SMS text messages in America. This is a healthy level, it averages to about 2 SMS per subsriber per day. That is what Britain did in 2005 and Ireland for example was at 3 SMS per day already in 2004, so the US still lags Europeans, but they are starting to catch up. This is good.

Gartner attributes the rapid adoption of SMS by Americans to the big free buckets of SMS. Obviously still today, that is only arriving to about the world average of 2 SMS per day (Informa said 2.6 SMS per day; this Garner study said 2.1), and the UK today is at 6 SMS per day, Singapore at 12, Philippines at 15 SMS sent per subscriber per day.

But this is very good news for the mobile industry in America. Now Americans are starting to fall in love with SMS. They will learn like the more advanced markets, that SMS is a more appealing service than voice calls, and eventually will come to the same conclusion (as for example the Irish and British did already a year or two ago) that the primary service on a cellphone is no longer voice, it is SMS texting.

The Americans are still years behind the leading countries of the mobile world in the 20 areas, as I explained last week in my extensive review of this topic on the Motorola CEO search blog and its related comparison of US mobile/wireless telecoms market to the rest of the world. But on this one aspect - SMS usage - definitely this is good news. Now Americans can start to discover Reachability, and become addicted to the cellphone, and then - it becomes possible to offer them far more advanced services as wel. A good trend. Thank you Slacker 711 for mentioning the Gartner study.

PS - Slacker 711 - the one comment I would have liked to add to your posting, was that Americans actually have the highest monthly fees for their mobile phone services (and that buys them the worst phones on the worst networks in the world). Only the Japanese pay similar rates and have magnificent phones and perfect networks in exchange. The average US consumer pays 50 dollars per month. The average European pays barely half that on far superior networks. So your thought that American cellphone prices are somehow cheap - sorry, think again. Here in Hong Kong for example we get local cellphone rates from any network to any network at one quarter of one US cent per minute (ie 0.0025 dollars, 0.25 cents, four minutes for one US cent). In Finland you can get a monthly contract for a dollar a month. And so forth..  That idea that Americans have lowest cost mobile telecoms is a total myth, it is only "true" on one measure, totally fake accounting. Look at the monthly spend, America is consistently most expensive.. Sorry about that. It only serves to support my main theme, that American wireless telecoms needs to evolve still much more..

Original Source: Communities Dominate Brands