Free Text Messaging Is Costing Telcos Huge

The use of data network-based text messaging allows users to avoid text messaging fees, and it is costing telcos a lot of money:

Alan Clendenning via AP

The London-based Ovum research firm estimates telecommunications companies lost nearly $14 billion last year in text-messaging revenue as consumers migrated to applications allowing them to send messages over cell phone data networks.

Ovum said the companies still took in an estimated $153 billion, but that was down 9 percent from a year earlier.

And where’s the bottom?

2 March 2012 33
text messagingtelcostelephonytech

Notes

  1. kevanboyles reblogged this from futuristgerd
  2. namosays reblogged this from futuristgerd
  3. kennethto reblogged this from stoweboyd and added:
    charges on texts are exorbitant,...should be expected that innovation would eventually...
  4. thenelsontwins reblogged this from slavin and added:
    And where’s the bottom?...understood how they could charge one red cent. Granted there is...
  5. ricardocamargo reblogged this from futuristgerd
  6. homeownersinsurancemiami reblogged this from emergentfutures
  7. slavin reblogged this from stoweboyd and added:
    Well, I wouldn’t say it’s costing them anything. Text messaging never cost them anything in the first place — they are...
  8. hypersonicscreech reblogged this from futuristgerd and added:
    Given that what the carriers charge for text messaging is near extortion (especially given that the service is...
  9. readinglist32 reblogged this from emergentfutures
  10. futuristgerd reblogged this from stoweboyd
  11. mattgen88 reblogged this from emergentfutures and added:
    This is just the end of a cash cow. There’s no reason to charge for text messaging when every single phone on the market...
  12. emergentfutures reblogged this from stoweboyd
  13. This was featured in #Tech
  14. crazygm said: telcos focus in becoming bandwith providers and drop SMS or buy parts of social websites
  15. stoweboyd posted this

← Previous Post Next Post →

About

Web anthropologist, futurist, author. My focus is the future, and the tectonic forces pushing business, media, and society into an unclear and accelerating future. more.

Working on longer format projects, Sign up for the newsletter.

GigaOM Research analyst and curator.

Also writing beaconstreets.com.

Contact me. or ask me a question.



My Vizify profile.

Socialogy

  • John Hagel | John offers up some great insights, like the fact that passion is lower the larger that businesses get.

  • Euan Semple | A chat with my old pal, and the author of Organizations Don't Tweet, People Do

  • Will McInnes | The author of Culture Shock and managing director of Nixon/McInnes

  • Jennifer Magnolfi | An interview with the woman who said, 'Work is not a place you go, it's a thing you do'.

    • Hot Now

  • What Drives Us? | A draft chapter of my book, discussing motivations, Maslow's hierarchy, and fluidarity.

  • Socialogy: Interview With John Hagel | I Speak with Joh Hagel about the innovation at the edge.

  • Complex organisation arises from webs of interaction among causal factors | So, it turns out that DNA is, in fact, a great metaphor for business culture, but only after you realize that DNA is not a few hundred off-on switches, but instead a universe of unknowable complexities, that we can interact with, and understand at some abstract cartoonish level, but not control, and never fully comprehend.

  • Bitcoin May Be the Global Economy’s Last Safe Haven | Paul Ford

  • Innovators Get Better With Age | Companies make a mistake by relying too much on the innoations of the young, because Nobel laureats don't come into their prime until their 50s.

    • Oldie

  • Infodemics | 2009 | Passing incomplete or inaccurate information about some risk event can make people take actions that increase the damage of the event itself.

    • Lynx theme created by Andrew Stichbury for Tumblr.