Telecom groups fight back against free text-messaging

Associated Press

BARCELONA, Spain

Just past the security gate for the world’s largest cellphone trade show in Barcelona, executives of big mobile carriers can’t avoid walking past a booth they probably would rather not see: It’s for “Pinger,” a small California company that offers free texting in the United States and Germany and has global expansion plans.

Pinger and an explosion of smartphone messaging services — such as iMessage, BlackBerry Messenger, WhatsApp, Viber Media, Facebook Messenger and KakaoTalk — have managed in just a few years to slash away at the important revenue that cellphone companies get from text messaging. Analysts say there’s no end in sight to the financial blood-letting.

The messaging services do it by offering applications that let phone users chat for free on the carriers’ data networks or Wi-Fi. Some, such as Pinger, make money from advertisements and work on computers as well.

The London-based Ovum research firm estimates telecommunications companies lost nearly $14 billion last year in text-messaging revenue as consumers migrated to applications allowing them to send messages over cellphone data networks.

Ovum said the companies still took in an estimated $153 billion, but that was down 9 percent from a year earlier, and Pinger co-founder Joe Stipher wants to reduce the amount even more.