A new report published by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) yesterday in honor of “World Statistics Day” details a wealth of information and data points on the wireless industry.
While the report details information spanning Online users, access to broadband networks and other concepts, several interesting stats related to the mobile channel were also outlined, such as the fact that the United States and the Philippines alone accounted for over one-third of all SMS messages sent worldwide in 2009.
What stood out to me were the revenue numbers associated with just SMS. Assuming an average cost of $0.07 per SMS — in 2010 alone, SMS traffic is generating an estimated $812,000 every minute, or around $14,000 every second. In 2009, SMS revenue accounted for 12% of China’s largest mobile operator’s total revenue, according to the report. In terms of usage, there were an estimated 1.8 trillion text messages sent in 2007, and today it’s approaching 6.1 trillion or roughly 200,000 texts every second.
These stats only scratch the surface of what’s included in the full report, which is available here.
