Interesting trend to observe these days in Europe: The revenue generated from data services in mobile networks is now close or even surpasses the revenue generated by SMS services. Recently, Vodafone Germany reported their numbers of the previous quarter compared to the quarter a year ago here and the table shows how data service revenue is now slightly higher than SMS revenue. Only a year ago, data revenues were still significantly behind.
What the table does not show, however, is that from an earnings point of view, SMS is probably still far ahead. After all, transferring 160 character messages through the network at a price of around 10 cents makes a far better bottom line than the megabytes of data transferred at a flat rate. But nevertheless, things are changing and it shows how mobile Internet access continues to increase in importance to mobile network operators.
above that, the SMS get sent via a separate channel in the control towers, not the main ones, where data also has to go through so they even save on channels. 🙂