Canadians sent over 20 Billion text messages in 2008

[hugh]

D.U. TXT MSG? Chances are you do because Canadians love their text messaging. In 2008, Canadians sent more than 20.7 billion person-to-person text messages according to stats from the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association (CWTA).

[VoltesV]

to compare : (from wikipedia)

The Philippines alone sends on the average 400 million text messages a day or approximately 142 billion text messages sent a year

Mobile Service Providers in New Zealand, such as Vodafone and Boost Mobile, provide up to 2000 SMS messages for NZ$10 per month. Users on these plans send on average 1500 SMS messages every month.

Users in Spain sent a little more than fifty messages per month on average in 2003. In Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom the figure was around 35–40 SMS messages per month.

In the Republic of Ireland, a total of 1.5 billion messages are sent every quarter, on average 114 messages per person per month.[8] Whilst in the United Kingdom over 1 billion text messages are sent every week.

In the United States, text messaging is also popular; as reported by CTIA, the average number of text messages sent per subscriber per month was 188.

[Arthur Dent]

This made me remember how in the year 2000 I was looking for a cell phone and provider. At that time Fido was the only one that had text messaging - Fido to Fido and Fido to every other GSM provider in the world. I remember during my selection process, in conversations with salesmen for some cell companies, when I brought this up, some didn't even know what I was talking about and some said things along the lines of "who would need that" - a view obviously shared by the executives at Telus, Rogers and Clearnet at the time, whose phones didn't have messaging functionality or it was disabled (Bell wasn't even available in Western Canada). How misguided and pathetic these strong opinions of once almighty executives look now!
Of course, that's nothing compared to the stupidity of top notch financial execs during the sub-prime mortgage era, but still worth mentioning.

[hugh]

The Philippines alone sends on the average 400 million text messages a day or approximately 142 billion text messages sent a year

Interesting. That's maybe 6x the number with 3x the population.

In Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom the figure was around 35–40 SMS messages per month.

Which is actually lighter than Canada

We dont' have timeframes nor cellphone subscription numbers so the comparisons might be skewed but their is no question that countries that don't have an excellent landline POTS infrastructure use cell services and texting much more than those that do.

For this reason, I would expect less developed or recently developed countries to be greater cell phone and text users.