SMS traffic back to nearly 1 bln/day under new system to check pesky messages

India’s mobile SMS traffic has reached close to a billion SMSes per day, similar to the levels before the new regime was implemented on April 1, thus showing increased adaptability to the blockchain technology-based system to filter pesky messages.

The volume of SMSes delivered per day had declined almost 30% to 700 million in the first week of April as business entities held back on sending promotional SMSes to avoid failures. But now that the traffic has reached almost normal levels, experts expect the SMS channel to grow beyond 1 billion as Covid-led restrictions make it the most relevant choice for marketing needs of enterprises.

“A big change like DLT (distributor ledger technology) was well adopted in a few weeks by businesses which tells you that SMS still has a long way to sustain,” said Aniketh Jain, chief revenue officer of telemarketing firm Kaleyra.

“No doubt that SMS is still the go-to channel for businesses, given the digital wave which has accelerated the power of communication across SMS, rich-media messages and voice. Festivity and sporting activities have fuelled SMS consumption across soon taking it back to 1 billion,” he said.

As consumers rebound to their homes amid the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, there will be faster adoption of digitization in areas like payments, e-learning, e-commerce, e-health and gaming. According to executives close to blockchain operations of telecom companies, the banking and financial services industry, education and healthcare are currently the largest and fastest growing contributors to daily SMS volumes.

“Although there is significant growth coming from large enterprises, unfortunately, the DLT system has washed away 10-15% of the traffic from small businesses, who still need hand-holding to adopt the new technology,” one telco executive told ET on condition of anonymity.

Leading messaging service provider Gupshup said alternative channels of conversational messaging like WhatsApp Business Messaging, Google’s Rich Communication Services (RCS) and the company’s own GIP solution are fast-picking pace in India.

“India is a mobile-first country and so SMS is the biggest channel for enterprises,” said Beerud Sheth, CEO, Gupshup. “But as internet usage is fast exploding, businesses are increasingly considering the use of AI for chatbots in various sectors, across different languages and for use-cases like marketing, sales, customer support etc.”

Tata Communications said enterprises are moving towards “conversational commerce” and choosing newer multimedia platforms over plain messaging services to differentiate and declutter.

“In these challenging times, as communication with the general public is key to survival, and all media channels are overflowing with news and information snippets, CPaaS will enable customised communications via an individual’s channel-of-choice,” the company spokesperson said.