Comment by edent
3 years ago
Not common isn't quite right. Ofcom's report shows that SMS use is shrinking, but it is still an average of 51 messages per user per month.
Source https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/222401/...
SMS decline is probably inevitable though.
That seems really high based on my UK experience. The link says "the average mobile connection sent 51 messages per month". What does it mean for a "connection" to send messages? Could that include messages sent to the user? If so, this number would make sense (OTPs and spam).
It's the only comment in a long and pointless Europe-does-this/no-it-doesn't that has found any statistics at all, so I think it's reasonable to accept it, unless much more detailed statistics can be found.
I absolutely accept that the statistic is probably a true number of something, it's just unclear from the wording what the something is.
Wow, 51 messages _sent_ per user per month, so it's not even about receiving verification SMS.
> The average mobile connection sent 51 messages per month in 2020, 17 fewer than in 2019.
I'd love to know the median, I assume there's a number of power users that drives up the average. Or bots that are sending out thousands of messages a day.
"Wow"? That's two messages per day. Or just one single long conversation with somoenoe per month, like organizing a dinner and going back and forth around a subject a few times.
Wow, it's really dead.
Granted, I'm not in the UK, but Germany's market is somewhat similar regarding pricing etc. Not even my mother uses SMS, most people use either WhatsApp or Telegram, with some Threema and Signal mixed in.
Apparently Germany has ~8bn SMS for 160m contracts (don't ask me why there's an average of two contracts per person), which is like 50 a year. Edit: that number seems to include automated messages.
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"average person sends 51 sms a month" factoid is actually just statistical error...
51 messages per month in 2020.