A2P SMS' days are a long way from being numbered now...

Clear as a bell I remember being at a wonderful GSMA WAS meeting hosted by Infobip in their home town in Croatia where I met a number of people from an assortment of companies (they will remain nameless) who told me that Application-to-Person SMS' days were well and truly numbered. That in a matter of a handful of years it would be heading towards irrelevance. Let's just say the issues around Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp that impacted much of the world very recently have put perhaps the final nail in THAT coffin of thought...

The humble SMS is proving to be that journeyman heavyweight boxer with heavy hands that just gets on with the job of putting people to sleep like clockwork. Whilst not having the brash, effusive personality of some, the fancy footwork and highly entertaining style of others, it just gets on with its job without fanfare - and the majority of people just love it for that. It's reliable. The latest brash contender may come along spouting big promises but then the proof of the pudding has always been in its eating. Time will catch up with everybody and everything at one point or other and therefore it's important to be constantly evolving. Time is something SMS most definitely still has when it comes to B2C and B2B mobile engagement. But evolve it surely must.

Enough of you have known me long enough to know me as an ardent fan of SMS but I do not wear rose-tinted spectacles and have blinkers on. SMS isn't perfect. It's not 100% secure but tell me what other ubiquitous channel is as readily understood by practically any demographic you may choose anywhere, can reach 5 billion people - and all without the need of the internet or a smartphone - and does a better of grabbing attention. Let me save you time. There isn't one. SMS has one thing I value so highly in this day and age, where the fashions seem to change with the wind and (is it just me?) many organisations appear increasingly unreliable - consistency.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Malick Dibba, the CEO and Founder of Alchemy Telco Ltd. in Gambia (Africa) a few days ago. Malick is in Gambia was a speaker on my (what else?!) SMS related panel at Mobile Ecosystem Forum (MEF) CONNECTS Wholesale 2021 event last Monday, September 27th. Much of the country had no internet coverage at all for a 4-day period due to a host of problems: first the submarine cable, then NAMWEC their electricity company had outages so the internet supplier went down. And then the cherry on the icing of the 'no internet' cake was a local cable down due to a storm! Mobile data is unbelievably expensive so just to stream to watch Malick was well over d1000 which is over ￡14. A lot of money anywhere but in Gambia...a huge amount. So, by the way, thanks to those that did invest to watch. Given barely 25% of the population in Gambia have access to internet at the best of times, guess which channel is used by every major organisation down there for customer engagement? You guessed right.

3.5 billion people across the world were impacted yesterday for nearly 6 hours when WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram were totally knocked out due to what Facebook call a "faulty configuration change". The problem is that it isn't just people but whole organisations that are impacted. Marketing, transactional and informative information sent out over those channels by enterprises were dead ducks. And it's not just those using such channels to send content out that had their businesses impacted. I was trying to book a hotel in the USA but was unable to via their website for the same duration of the Facebook outage. Just a Spotify was impacted back in 2019 when the previous long outage took place. So many companies have their systems inextricably linked with solutions from other companies that you ALWAYS need to have a backup plan. And that has to be SMS.

Talking to a couple of MNOs I know, their SMS traffic spiked 30% yesterday so no matter who you are or what you do, even if just having it in place as a fallback, SMS needs to be in your mobile engagement communications stack. The same goes for your internal communications amongst your own team members, something so often overlooked.

With 2 TRILLION A2P SMS transactions annually and growing rapidly, SMS cannot be something you ignore. And if there is one thing that should show you that, it's the valuations of messaging behemoths such as Twilio and Sinch, $57.4 billion and $14.3 billion respectively. Look under the hood and you'll find that a large chunk of that value is underpinned by the power of SMS to truly capture the attention of people. Something that is not disappearing anytime soon at all...