Pakistan enjoys largest text messaging in Asia and around 151.6385 billion text messages were exchanged during the Year 2009, which is 1,532 Short Message Service (SMS) per subscriber, while the messages exchanged from July-Sep 2010 were 48,846 million.
Pakistan has seen a stunning and remarkable growth in both, the mobile subscriber base and the SMS traffic during the past few years and the mobile subscriber base is touching the figure of 100 million by the last quarter of Year 2010. Around the world, SMS is used by four billion mobile users, who sent five trillion messages in 2009 which is approximately 105 SMS, per person per month, which are less than 128 SMS per person exchanged per month in Pakistan. According to a percent research, SMS traffic will grow double in coming four years and it is estimated that by 2013, the volume of messages will double to 10 trillion.
According to report of International Telecommunication Union (ITU), in Year 2010, a total of 6.1 trillion SMS have been exchanged world-wide from 5.3 billion mobile cellular subscriptions world-wide, including 940 million subscriptions to 3G services, which has jumped from 1.8 trillion SMS in the Year 2007.
According to officials in Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), text messaging has leapt three folds in the past three years, with almost 200,000 text messages exchanged every second. According to ITU, the globe is currently earning 14,000 dollars every second from SMS that is, assuming an average cost of seven dollars per SMS, in 2010 SMS is generating an estimated 812 000 dollars every minute from 5.3 billion users. Much of the consistent growth of SMS is due to its ever widening adoption beyond peer-to-peer messaging such as banking, social networking, enterprise applications, advertising and machine to machine communication.
According to a recent survey, global mobile banking services will be generating 90 billion text messages per annum by 2015, as banks seek to utilise SMS as a means of enhancing customer communications and services.