Print

Comment

Email

Digg

Del.icio.us

Reddit

Experts gazing in the crystal ball of mobile usage in the country believe that SMS is not just likely to come down dramatically in the time to come but may stop altogether. This is mainly because it would be more economical to send an email via mobile internet instead of sending an SMS.

“Typically, the data plans currently on offer charge 10 paise for 10 kb. So an email of say 100 bytes would cost 0.1 paise as compared with an SMS of around 100 characters which normally costs Rs 1,” explains Vinay Goel, head of products, Google India.

There were around 3-5 million data plan users in the country about two years back, but thanks to the surge in the last year, the number has gone up to 20 million now. This is further likely to increase in the times to come.

India is one of the few countries which records a high SMS traffic. According to TRAI data, an average Indian sends 29 SMS per month. It is used not just to keep in touch with friends and family, bit to check mobile bills, book train tickets etc.

However, going forward, India will also follow the trend prevalent in the developed countries of high data traffic and low or negligible SMS traffic. As of now, the usage patterns of web on mobile are similar to that on the PC, according to Goel.