The mobile phone is a key communication object. However, its use is changing. For several years, operators have observed a glaring reduction in the use of SMS.
Technology may have blown out its 30 candles in 2022, but it no longer attracts. New Year’s Eve night is always a choice marker to observe this descent.
In Orange, the drop is severe. Despite a peak of 671,758 text messages exchanged between midnight and 00:01 during the transition to 2023, subscribers of the main French operator sent 12.7% fewer text messages than in the previous New Year and received 19.25% less (during 48 hours). period between December 31 and January 1).
The victory of the courier.
The trend is the same with other service providers. SFR saw SMS exchanges drop by around 12% that night (between 11pm and 3am) compared to last year. The company processed the sending and receiving of almost 25 million text messages during this period. A similar observation was made at Bouygues Télécom with 5% fewer shipments.
This SMS abandonment trend materializes year after year with figures in constant decline. To explain this disavowal, we must resort to messaging applications, such as WhatsApp.
While the total volume of SMS from Orange subscribers fell by 4.4%, data exchanges have never been higher. The provider’s customers used 2,790,121 TB of data in 2022, an increase of 37.7% in one year.
Again, the competition was able to see this enthusiasm as we transitioned into the new year. Bouygues Télécom assures that the use of data was twice as important on January 1 between midnight and 00:30 a.m. than in the same period on the other days of the year. SFR also points to an increase in traffic on messaging applications.
Specific uses of SMS
It must be said that with the proliferation of communication channels through applications, text messages have lost their rank as the king of written discussion. Now we must have social networks, each with a device for private messages. And when it’s not Instagram, Twitter or Snapchat that undermines text messages, specific applications take over: WhatsApp, Messenger or Telegram.
Above all, recent years have seen the increasing use of phone manufacturer-specific messaging systems. Apple thus encourages the sending of messages through its own device, iMessages. This proprietary protocol even becomes a sign of social distinction among adolescents.
Everything would lead one to believe that 2022 was the last round of SMS. Except that text messages are still essential for specific tasks, particularly in the field of authentication. To verify your identity, it is through an SMS that banks, insurance companies or any other service send you a unique code. Despite its outdated appearance and its 30 years of existence, SMS therefore seems to have a few years of respite before disappearing completely from communication modes.
Source: BFM TV
