The first text message is claimed to have been sent in 1992 on the Vodafone UK network – but – it was not until 2004 when text messaging really took off in Canada. That year 710 million text messages were generated in Canada. Today, Canadians surpass that much traffic in just a few days.
Indeed; statistics released yesterday by the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association, (CWTA), show the continued annual growth in SMS traffic. Canadians generated 56.4 billion text messages in 2010, which is up 60% from 2009’s SMS traffic figure of 35.3 billion messages.
Canadians are also opting in and sending more messages to commercial Short Code services. Canada posted 2.3 billion text messages on Common Short Code numbers in 2010. This represents an increase of 36% over 2009’s figure of 1.7 billion – and a jump on the 1.1 billion generated in 2008.
December continues to be a big month for SMS usage. Canadian mobile consumers, (24.5 million people), sent 5.8 billion text messages in December alone. South of the border saw US mobile consumers, (302,9 million users), posting in a record 187.7 billion texts in December.
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