How the 3G internet has changed the telecom companies' life

With the booming of smartphones and tablets in the last four/five years, the business model of telephony companies has been put against the wall. With the competition of applications that replace phone calls and text messages, the carriers are betting and investing more than ever on sales of data packet to the internet.

Today there are 273 million of active mobile phones in Brazil and 38% of this amount has access to the internet 3G - in 2009 this percentage didn’t exceed 2%. Access to mobile broadband also made popular applications to exchange messages and files such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Viber and a few others. Each time, users are more connected not only by 3G but also by Wifi hotspots, and then, users need less to fall back on SMS with more alternatives for phone calls and messages.

The change is not only in Brazil, but globally. A research by the British consulting Ovum says that the preference for applications makes telecom operators around the world stop profiting USD 33 billion per year with SMS. The prediction is that the next two years, the value of the annual loss will reach USD 54 billion. In 2012, the consulting company Informa affirms that the number of messages exchanged by apps for the first time surpassed the number of text messages sent via SMS - it was 19 billion messages per day compared to 17.9 billion.

With this scenario, it made the telecom companies had changed the strategic and charge less for the SMS, now selling by a pack of 100 or 500 SMSs, before that, charged by unit. Despite of being the voice service as the main service, the revenues coming from this vertical are dropping in some countries and in Brazil stopping growing. The telephone companies are now increasingly investing in landline and mobile broadband, which is where it is coming revenue growth.