SMS still the king of mobile data

Despite the growth in general data services the short messaging service (SMS) is still accounting for the bulk of mobile data traffic and growth shows no sign of slowing down.

“SMS is the biggest messaging system in the world today, and it's still growing and growing phenomenally,” said Peter Barry, head of Venture Capital and Emerging Technology at Vodafone.

“The mobile phone is still primarily a communications mechanism and you can't afford to forget that.”

the use of SMS in the developing world was picking up strongly he said, and was still a huge industry in the developed world.

But for mobile data to really kick off worldwide a new set of data plans have to be formulated, according to Google. Vic Gundotra, vice-president of engineering for Google, told the MobileBeat 2009 conference that with the right plan data use exploded.

He cited a recent case in India where a carrier offered unlimited data for 100 rupees. The offer caused a rush of subscribers and a massive spike in data use.

“We discovered that only by spotting a huge spike in traffic usage; it spiked at 50x normal usage.

“As we get better browsers and data plans in the developing world very interesting things will happen.”

He also said that Google had hard data on how many people were searching with them from their mobile phones and said there was considerable and growing traffic worldwide.