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Business communications rely on the sending of timeous information. SMS communications are used for internal business communications, notifications, reminders, alerts, marketing messages and the broadcast of information such as financial market trends.
"South Africa is the first country where SMS as a business communication tool has surpassed the use of SMS for consumer mobile content. This was one of the key trends that emerged at the Global Messaging conference held in London during May 2006," says Streicher.
"It is not only due to the fact that South African banking institutions rely on SMS verifications for account transactions but that businesses across the board have found SMS an invaluable tool to communicating short messages to staff, suppliers and customers."
According to Streicher, the higher cost of SMS, compared to email, is a benefit for business communications and ensures that SMS retains its value as a communications medium over email as a corresponding form of business communications. There are three reasons why SMS will surpass email as a business communications tool, despite its higher cost.
"Lowering the cost of a communications medium increases the likelihood for spam or unwanted messages. By keeping the cost of SMS above a certain threshold, most spam is eliminated. In some countries, the only form of spam that still pays is SMS scams using premium rate mobile services. Nevertheless, these scams have been easily controlled by cutting the revenue to the service provider," comments Streicher.
According to Streicher, even though pressure should be brought to networks to reduce overall communications costs, there is value for the networks, businesses and users to maintain the cost of SMS to ensure the continued value of the service for business communications.