Commentary on an Article on FastCompany.com: Fast Analysis: Data Consumption Surpasses Voice Calling by U.S. Cell Users

NOTE: This was supposed to post a while ago. For some reason it never uploaded so it may be a little aged.

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There’s a subtle, but potentially hugely important, change happening in cell phone use in the U.S.: For 2009 figures, the amount of digital data sent over cell phone networks surpasses voice traffic for the first time. The future has arrived.

~ Fast Analysis: Data Consumption Surpasses Voice Calling by U.S. Cell Users by Kit Eaton

This thrills me beyond explanation. I have always had a hard time using phones because I have a hard time hearing. Finding out that many other people also use mostly data makes me feel justified when I insist that people text message me.

The U.S. has finally caught up with the SMS trend, many years after it exploded across Europe, and CTIA data shows that the number of text messages sent by the average U.S. user leaped 50% in 2009 from the previous year.

I never understood why text messaging of any sort took so long to take off in the US. From the minute I heard the term “SMS” from my friends in foreign countries, I wanted to be right on that train. It took until the age of Twitter to make it a reality here. How interesting.

And remember that by far the greater number of phones still in use on these networks aren’t the data-munching smartphones like iPhones or Android devices–they’re the old-style dumbphones, which may be capable of limited Net browsing and picture messaging, but which still serve the primary task of phone calling and SMSing.

Where I am at, I would not have believed this if I was told it vocally. I use a dumbphone and about half the people I talk to do so as well, but the other half is all smartphone. I personally use an ancient bar dumbphone that is pay-as-you-go everything. Nearly everyone in my office is moving to smartphones if they are the least tech savvy. I am going to follow that trend soon since I have begun texting and communicating more and more in the last few months. I am turning green with envy to get a smartphone with apps… but at the moment I will be content knowing that the dumbphones are being used just as much as I would hope they would be.

And when that happens, something odd will happen to the cellphone providers themselves–they’ll be relegated to merely being vanilla pipes over which your lovely smartphone data flows.

Aren’t they already? LOL thanks Kit Eaton, this was a fun article for me.