According to a new forecast issued by research firm Informa, consumers are on pace to send 41 billion over-the-top mobile messages per day by the end of 2013.
The volume of OTT messaging traffic is set to be twice that of P2P SMS messaging by the close of the year, today’s report reads, noting that there are far more P2P SMS users than there are OTT messaging users.
There were about 3.5 billion P2P SMS users in 2012, according to Informa, compared with about 586.3 million users of OTT messaging.
It has taken OTT messaging about five years to reach this point; BlackBerry Messenger was launched in 2007, and a number of other messaging apps have launched at various intervals since then. By contrast, the first SMS was sent about 20 years ago, with the first commercial service launching a couple of years later.
“Even though SMS and OTT messaging are two different services, and are used in different ways by subscribers,” the report reads, “Informa believes that a comparison of the average daily traffic of the two services is relevant, given that OTT messaging is increasingly used as a substitute for SMS in a number of markets.”
To read the full announcement from Pamela Clark-Dickson at Informa, click here.