Short-lived glory for SMS

At its peak, the SMS service could make up for as much as 10 per cent of a telco's total revenues, now it's negligible in the overall share

The Monday night WhatsApp-Facebook blackout halted conversations and businesses across India—the largest market of the Menlo Park-headquartered group. But the mega outage, the first of its kind in scale, also pushed desperate mobile users to SMS, which has been on the slide for long. With 400 million WhatsApp users out of 2 billion worldwide, the data-based platform has increasingly been adopted as the primary mode of chat in India.

So what’s the SMS universe like now? Mostly used for receiving OTPs to transact online and sometimes for bank statement updates, SMS is just an idle but must-have entity on the phone