Americans send billions of texts… or is it trillions?
Government figures released this week showed more than a hundred billion texts were sent in the U.S. during 2008. But the cellphone industry has pointed out the true figure is substantially more than that.
The Census Bureau issued a press release stating that 110 billion texts were sent during last year, up from 48 million in 2007. (The delay in reporting those figures is presumably bureaucracy at work.) That figure has been reported in several major outlets.
However, the CTIA, which represents the wireless industry, says the Census Bureau blundered and that the figure in fact only represents December 2008. The Bureau has now admitted that is the case. Embarrassingly it appears it made the same error a year earlier: 48 million was for December 2007, not 2007 as a whole.
So what’s the true annual figure for the year? Well, the CTIA estimates that for last year it was a little over 1.25 trillion. For the first half of 2009, it’s around 740 million texts, a third up on the same period in 2008. If that pattern continues, this year’s figure will be somewhere in the 1.65 trillion range (the second half of the year is slightly busier as so many people send texts at Christmas.)
Other notable points from the Census Bureau report include that the average cellphone bill has barely changed in the past five years, hovering consistently around the $50 mark. The most likely explanation is that the market has found a price acceptable to both carriers and users, and that networks have either made individual texts cheaper or offered more unlimited text packages.
One note that seems a little counterintuitive is that the average call length has dropped over the past few years, from three minutes to two-and-a-half minutes. It would seem to have made more sense that average times would have increased slightly as the growth of texting takes away the need to make extremely short calls to exchange brief pieces of information.
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