3jam Blog         

SMS is not about to be replaced by 3G services…

Posted by andy, February 18th, 2006

Interesting comments by Mike Butcher at 160 characters after attending 3GSM on how SMS is here to stay, despite the introduction of flashy new 3G services.

“Despite the varied new messaging options, 3G subscribers are still more likely to use SMS in comparison to non-3G users, so we are not seeing cannibalisation of SMS revenues, as some have speculated,” said Paul Goode, vice president and senior analyst, M:Metrics. “Instead, we see that they are sending SMS while being twice as likely to use mobile e-mail and instant messaging.”

So what does this tell you? SMS isn’t about to be replaced by ’sexy’ 3G services, and in fact it will only expand further.

This mirrors what happened in the Internet space. As broadband penetration spread, what happened? The faster speeds meant people accessed and consumed more online. They didn’t necessarily want more broadband ‘content’ (although music downloads and video have obviously been huge) but the mainstream of users just wanted more “internet” - email and web surfing. They knew what worked - it just needed to be *faster*. The same experience will happen with 3G. We’ll just message more, since sending and receiving texts will be much faster.

But here’s a parting thought. With new services coming on stream and the old stalwarts of voice and SMS coming under increasing competition, will other multimedia services take up the slack?

Somewhow I doubt it. SMS can only get cheaper, but at the end of the day it remains the same products - 160 characters of pure, unadulterated, highly personal communication.

People LOVE messaging, and they’ll do it by the cheapest, most widely available means, and that’s going to be SMS for a long time to come.

I agree with Mike’s comments, and would add that it is not clear that the successful services of the future will be the services that are simple-mindedly lifted off the MP3 player or the PC or the television and dropped onto the phone. The phone is fundamentally for conversations, and so the most successful services will blend together content and conversations. Think blogs, but multimedia and ad hoc. In the future, the mobile phone will act as a user’s remote control for their digital life and as their microphone to participate in this new seamlessly connected medium (thanks Ethan for the microphone concept).

People place a very high value on their ability to talk to their friends. And this is the reason 3jam is focused on making text messaging work the way it should. On the phone, the conversation is the core and multimedia services need to wrap around it. Not the other way round.