My thumbs hurt just thinking about it.
While I am sure the bulk of those text messages were sent by teenagers (and most of them probably have carpel tunnel), that’s still a giant number.
The 10 billion figure represents a 100 percent increase in the amount of SMS traffic since September 2006.
So, do you think text messaging has finally caught on?
I did a little bit of math… hehe… yeah, I’m a geek, with laptop 
Ok, so check it out, ten billion text messages in one month breaks down to:
- 333.3 million per day
- 13.9 million per hour
- 231,481 per second
That’s a lot of bits and bytes of data flying around through the air at any given moment. But wait, that’s not all.
Verizon’s subscribers also sent 200 million multimedia messages (MMS), which include picture and video messages. That’s 46,296 per second for those keeping count.
In the press release, VP and CMO for Verizon Wireless Mike Lanman said:
We’ve delivered exponential growth in our messaging services for two primary reasons: our innovative devices, such as the enV, that make it easy to text, and our innovative messaging capabilities that allow customers to communicate how they want.
Just last week I was sitting in a Starbucks and noticed three different teenagers using the enV to send SMS messages. I was amazed at how fast their thumbs were. Good grief, they just blaze across the keypad without even looking at it!
What about the other wireless carriers?
C’mon, Cingular/AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Alltel. Tell us how many messages your subscribers sent so we can get a clear pictures of how many messages are sent each month across the entire spectrum of U.S. wireless subscribers.
In the meantime, if we do some more creative math, I think we can get an approximation.
There are 240.5 million wireless subscribers in the United States. Verizon has about 61 million, or about one-quarter of the total.
If we assume that other wireless companies’ subscribers send and receive messages at the same rate as Verzon’s (average of 164 per user per month), that’s 39.4 billion total SMS messages in the U.S. per month.
I think it is safe to say that anything people are doing 39 billion times per month has reached general acceptance and widespread use in the market.
I just hope that the subscribers have buckets of messages and aren’t paying per message.
Thoughts?
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Was it you that was asking me how much I Text Message to estimate your potential usage? I love texting. I wonder what the age distribution is for these messages.
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