The volume of short messaging service has fallen sharply with the promotional offers ending in the first week of August. According to industry sources, the SMS volume has dropped from over 25 lakh (2.5 million) per day at the time of the promotional offers to under 10 lakh (1 million) this month.
Meanwhile, the telecommunications companies are looking at re-launching the promotional offers as they have already invested in upgrading infrastructure to meet the higher SMS volumes.
Hutch, the leading cellular operator in Gujarat, on Wednesday relaunched SMS promotional schemes for the pre-paid segment. Other cellular companies are likely to follow suit.
Without going into numbers, Hutch chief operating officer Sanjoy Mukerji said SMS volumes shot up seven times during the promotional offers.
"After the promotional offers ended, the SMS volume did come down, but is still stable at around double what it used to be before the promotional offers," Mukerji said.
Under Hutch's new scheme, which the company says will be for a "limited period", new subscribers will pay just 60 paise for a SMS for one month.
The offer has been extended to the existing pre-paid customers as well. They can send a SMS for 60 paise for a period of one month by paying a fixed amount of Rs 25.
Airtel chief operating officer, Gujarat, Atul Joshi, said SMS volumes have decreased after the promotional schemes were withdrawn, but company officials could not provide the exact decrease in SMS volume.
Idea officials also admitted that the SMS flow has decreased, but the exact figures were not available.
SMS volumes had registered a steep hike in Gujarat, after all cellular companies operating in the state offered promotional schemes to customers.
The SMS flow before the promotional schemes, for both post paid and pre-paid categories, was around 400,000 per day, and this had increased to almost 25 lakh per day in just a little over a month. All promotional schemes ended on in the first week of August.
The biggest gainer was Hutch. Its SMS volume per day shot up seven times from around 300,000 SMS per day to over 20 lakh (2 million) SMS per day.
In fact, the company had to install new SMS centres to handle the heavy flow of SMS even as complaints of SMS being delivered late started pouring in.
SMS volumes of Idea Cellular and Airtel too had registered a growth of around 50 per cent when the promotional scheme was offered.
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