I have to admit that I never really cared about text messaging and even found it quite annoying and useless – before the time of my divorce. Now I am infinitely grateful for this service as it allows me as a single parent to keep contact with my children when they are not with me. But it seems that not only I have gone SMS crazy, but many other people in the U.S. as well. According to the Census Bureau’s most recent data, more than 110.4 billion text messages are sent from U.S., cell phones – every month.

That number applies to December 2008 and is more than double from the 48 billion text messages that were recorded in December 2007. At the time there were 270.3 million active cell phone lines in the U.S., which averages out to about 407 text messages per active cell phone per month. Analysts from Nielsen said that U.S. consumers sent more text messages than made phone calls for the first time in the second quarter of 2008. Back then, consumers placed an average of about 214 calls from their cell phones per month, while the number of text messages was 357. 13 to 17 year old teenagers remain the most active SMS group with about 2000 messages sent per month.

Market researchers said that back in 2005 the number of text messages sent globally was less than 100 billion per month and they believe that we will send more than 3 trillion text messages around the globe in the coming year. Interestingly, we do not send as many multimedia messages that, for example, include pictures or video: According to the Census Bureau figures, 1.6 billion MMS messages were sent every month from cell phones in the U.S. in 2008.

Of course, we are also spending much more on cell phone services than we used to. According to the Census Bureau, the annual cost of cellphone service per line was $608 per year in 2007, up from $455 in 2005 and up from $210 in 2001. And yes, that number does not quite include today’s smartphone services that drive Blackberrys and iPhones and can cost you well more than $1000 every year. The average monthly cell phone bill was $50.07 in 2008.

It is worth noting that data services are becoming much more important to cell phone carriers, which is reflected by the currently dropping cost for all-you-can-eat voice plans – you can get unlimited voice plans for less than $50 these days. Data services are the new cash cow but they create a huge burden for cell phone carriers, which, for example, prompted AT&T to temporarily halt iPhone sales in the New York area in order to reduce stress on its network. If you plan on using data services more and more down the road, make sure that you are with a provider that can actually handle the substantial data load and a provider that offers a reasonable price for data services.

Tags: cell phone, technology

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