Did you know that approximately 1 billion pound is spent on international SMS texting in the UK alone?
And did you know that the average price for an SMS text sent to and from the UK is in average 10 times higher than local SMS?
Mobile carriers don't proffer these type of statistics easily, as they'd like to keep a not so secret income stream as quiet as possible.
But let's just have a look at some facts as provided by 'National Statistics UK'. "The number of trips abroad taken by UK residents were exceeding 70 million in 2006. The number of visits made to the UK by overseas residents in 2005 was the highest ever recorded – 30.0 million."
You can imagine that these trips trigger millions of $$$ and £££ of revenue in international communication of which one is international SMS. A conservative estimate of 300 million pounds was spent on sending SMS text messages back to the UK in 2006. The remaining 700 million pounds were spent on international SMS messages from the UK to business partners, family members and friends abroad.
The company Orange announced that is is now starting to focus their marketing efforts in the UK on foreign nationals for just this reason. The market is gigantic. Orange found that the telephone card market which is almost exclusively carried by foreigners is now worth £800 million a year.
There are different avenues to avoid paying excessive SMS charges. One age old approach is to use re-routing services such as Ipipi. They allow users in the UK to diala UK number before their SMS is re-routed to their destination of choice abroad. Useful, but only when sending messages from the UK. As soon as the customer wants to travel, he or she could sign up with a service called GoSim. This service requires the user to physically swap their phones' Sim Card to take advantage of any savings. Again this a great option, especially for people travelling with two phones.
Thanks to GPRS which is available on every phone and every carrier, another solution is now accessible to reduce the cost of international SMS and one day possibly for local SMS too.
The term GPRS translates as Internet on your handset, not only for browsing websites but also to send data back and forth over the IP network. If you have used Google Map on your phone before, you will have seen a data counter at the top which tells you exactly how many bits and bytes you have downloaded to view the map on your phone.
GPRS SMS works in a similiar way. The leading services in the UK are called 10pText.co.uk and Blitzplanet. These services are offering their alternative for SMS messaging at a fraction of the cost of most carriers. Customers who sign up on these companies' websites can download the client application, and in no time their users are sending SMS messages from their servers and that is regardless of their carrier.
The messages must be sent via GPRS, so only GPRS capable phones and appropriate service plans qualify; but in the end users can save up to 80% on their charges. It'll cost about 0.10 pence per SMS message, while UK wireless companies charge an average of 0.35p to and from the UK through their servers. The SMS message arrives identically in the recipient's phone inbox.
In the near future mobile network carriers will be bundling GPRS SMS with their data connection charges if only to take away their competitors customer base. Any large carrier setting up a GPRS solution which works irrespective of whichever carrier is offering GPRS would without a doubt own the entire international SMS market.
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