UK now sending 6.5 billion texts per month

The Mobile Data Association has released its latest quarterly figures for UK mobile phones. In the third quarter of 2008 (July - September) it says usage for text and picture messages has continued increasing. Texting is up 38% year-on-year from Q3 2007, while MMS usage is up 20%. We're now sending an average 6.5 billion text messages sent per month - that's almost 217 million per day - and we're also sending an average of 1,495,525 multimedia messages every day. [Press release]

UK mobile internet and text use continues to rise

The Mobile Data Association's latest report, which covers January to May 2008, shows that SMS and mobile internet use is still growing. 212 million text messages are now sent in the UK every day, with annual growth expected to be around 30% for the year. Meanwhile, mobile web use is up 25% in the last two years to 16.5 million people per month. Growth in MMS is also good, up 30% from May last year to 46 million messages per month. [Press release]

MMS starting to follow rapid growth of text messages?

The UK's Mobile Data Association says MMS traffic in the UK is starting to increase dramatically. It points out that text messages hit '1 billion a year' after 6 years - and that picture messages are at around 50% of that figure after 5 years, despite only half of all mobiles having cameras. 57 million picture messages were sent last December, an increase of 55% from December 2006. In addition, almost 17 million UK mobile users (23% of all customers) accessed the internet from their mobile phones in December. [Sources: ITPro.co.uk, Sky News via Yahoo]