Andre Yoskowitz
7 Nov 2009 21:00
According to new CTIA figures, American mobile phones users send 4.1 billion texts per day, adding up to 740 billion for the first six months of 2009.
The numbers show that about 14 texts are sent everyday on average by every American mobile phone user (276 million), although many teens average in the thousands and many users do not even have texts enabled.
Yahoo Tech writer Ben Patterson gives the following example to show off the giant figure in a different light:
Or, how about this: An SMS has a maximum capacity of 160 characters, so let's say (for the sake of example) that your average text message is about 80 characters long. And let's assume that your average novel contains about 100,000 words, and each word has about five letters. So ... assuming all that (and keeping in mind that my math is a little shaky), we here in the States are writing the equivalent of about 656,000 books—all via SMS—every 24 hours. At that rate, we could match the entire catalog of the entire New York Public Library system (which holds about 20.4 million books) in a little over a month.
2008 set the current record for a full year with one trillion total messages, and this year (given stable traffic for the rest of the year), that number should be surpassed by 50 percent or more.