The Swedish regulator, PTS, released its telecom usage statistics for the first 6 months of 2012. The report is unfortunately at the moment available only in Swedish (short English abstract included, though) We can report some interesting figures for the mobile community, though: The number of mobile subscriptions is now 13M (on a population of 9.5M). In total there are now more than 6M Mobile data subscriptions – unfortunately for the “capacity crunch”, only about 80K LTE (4G) subscriptions – the reason is of course the limited availability of LTE terminals. This figure is rapidly increasing, though (up from 10K last year). The typical user – the one with a combined voice/data subscription (purple and green bars in the figure) consumed almost 0.9 GB/month, whereas the data only subscriber gobbled up more than 4GB/month. The “exponential” growth in total traffic continues .. up by 73% to 73 petabyte for the first half year (42 pB in 2011).
A noteworthy fact is that SMS-traffic seems (finally?) to have passed its apex. For the first time in the history of the measurements, SMS-traffic is no longer increasing, it is actually down 11%. However the Swedish cellular consumer still sends 117 SMS/month – on the average.
Regarding the SMS’s I don’t think it is a matter of behavior. I think it is a matter of alternative services. For example Apples iMessage which has reduced my sms usage to less than 50%. And as far as I know, the kids (who used to be the most frequent sms users) use Kik nowadays.
Exactly, Maria. We actually expected this to happen earlier. The cost for an SMS is still a few Eurocents – all the other stuff is for free once you have a MBB subscription. However if your friends do not have Smartphones or aren’t using your particular service.. SMS you know will get there – thats why the market grip is still strong, despite the obvious cost factors
I remember when Apple launched iMessage. Being an Apple fan, I said to my friends: “I think Apple just killed SMS” ;)