Over 15% of revenues generated by mobile operators globally came from non-voice services during last year. According to Informa Telecoms & Media’s World Cellular Data Metrics report, actual revenues comprising data services reached $188.7 billion in 2008, representing a 24% year-on-year increase.
As expected, there is a considerable disparity in the significance of non-voice revenues across the regions. For instance, carriers in North America generated about 20% of the total $192.8 billion revenues from non-voice services, as opposed to 5% of the $71.1 billion revenues from mobile operators in Africa.
The majority of non-voice revenues are still SMS-based, but at the end of 2008, 40% of this revenues was from non-SMS services. The deployment of advanced network technologies and the growing demand for Internet-enabled devices helped to accelerate the level of non-SMS spend.
For the record, there were 178.2 million subscribers using mobile data services at the end of last year… More information about the report is available from Informa’s website. (PDF)