I was wondering when this was going to happen. As soon as Apple launched iOS 5 last year, many of us in the tech press took one look at its iMessage feature and thought the same thing: The carriers are screwed. This week, we saw the first sign that that prediction may be coming true.
For years, mobile carriers have gotten fat on phone-users desire to send each other short, text-based messages. Carriers are still getting a hefty chunk of revenue from texting, but this week they saw the first-ever decline in SMS text messaging, according to a new report by independent mobile analyst Chetan Sharma. In the third quarter of this year, the number of text messages people sent to one another in the U.S. dropped by about 2%.