I am, therefore I text. Or so it seems with most teenagers these days. Text messaging is so popular that medical experts have identified excessive texting as a new form of addictive behaviour. Remedial treatment is available at the Priory - a clinic famed for its celebrity in-patients.
Despite this, texting is continuing to extend its reach into our lives. BT plans to offer a fixed line text facility that will allow you to send and receive texts from a home phone and even have the text message translated into speech. Working with Unisys, it claims the service will be able to cope with abbreviations and even graphics.
Text messaging continues to grow, albeit at a slower rate. New Year celebrations were punctuated by a record 110m texts sent on January 1 - a new daily record. According to the industry-backed Mobile Data Association (MDA), an average of almost 60m messages are sent daily, up 18% from a year ago. They amount to about £1.7bn in yearly revenue to operators.
This year, the big question is whether texting can gain a significant foothold in the business sector to make it worth further investment in the infrastructure that manages the text services. Although the operators touted business applications last year, success was limited.
The MDA is predictably upbeat: "There are now more ways for businesses to use text messaging thanks to software that allows email users to send texts and the arrival of simple pay-as-you-go business texting services. We also learnt from TVs Pop Idol text vote that we need to increase capacity to cope with demand," says Mike Short, the chairman of MDA.
A survey of leading UK firms by messaging firm Topcall found that the most common uses of SMS was to alert mobile technicians to system errors, alerting executives to urgent voice mails, warning travellers about delays, informing stock brokers of unusual trading activity and reminder alerts for sales executives.
TV's love affair with texting focuses on "interactive" services that allow votes to be collected instantly. Recent examples include Channel 4's Big Brother and BBC's Fame Academy. The use of short codes for texting has made it simple and fast to send a vote.
Publishers and TV companies have also dabbled with premium rate SMS, charging up to £1.50 for pushed content, games and ringtones. Big Brother 3 saw 10.7m text votes, and Fame Academy logged 6.9m votes.
But some third-party software suppliers feel operators should do more to increase capacity on their networks. Sicap, which sells a form of SMS overflow software to reduce congestion and improve delivery times at peak periods, is typical.
"We believe that operators need to improve their capacity; in our tests on New Year's Day we found that some texts took four hours to get through," says Per-Johan Lundin, Sicap head of marketing. "They also need to sort out some roaming arrangements so that texts are not lost when you are abroad."
Although most texts reach their destination in a few seconds, the fact that texts are - like emails - subject to "store and forward" technology means that there are a number of choke points along the road to their destination - the bandwidth to the operator, the SMS centre at the operator, and the buffer at the base station that locates the recipient.
Some third parties even offer a form of text audit to track quality of service. 2SMS offers business an easy broadcast text option from its website. Users of the service are able to get audits that allow them to see if messages were sent and received.
"We are finding that businesses are more concerned with quality of service than price. It also saves money because it means they don't need to carry a pager," says 2SMS managing director, Tim King. Vodafone also offers an option to receive notification of receipt of a text message.
Vodafone has just completed installation of load balancing software in its network to cope with the huge spikes created by big events and TV voting. "We don't advise business to broadcast texts during prime time TV on a Saturday night - but then there isn't much demand for that. But we are confident we can handle 100m texts per second now," says Jeremy Flyn, Vodafone's head of commercial partnerships. Vodafone predicts a moderate growth in business texting and is to launch in March software to enable business users to send and receive texts from the desktop.
"Companies are using it for short punchy messages - it's like a modern day telegram for congratulations to sales teams, details of new contracts and suchlike," says Orange business solutions marketing director Clive Richardson.
Orange predicts an increase in text traffic of between 7-15% this year. T-Online, which says it is assessing third party operators to pursue what it calls "a more aggressive position", predicts a 10% increase.
But industry analysts Ovum are less upbeat, highlighting concerns that operators are making too much profit for themselves from SMS to make it attractive to developers, are slow at paying out on premium services, and are slow to provide access to short codes for customers.
Ovum principal analyst, John Delaney, says that operators need to do more to make it attractive for third parties to offer premium rate services with simple billing systems. He believes that a lack of helpfulness is pushing third parties to intermediaries - thus adding another tier of charging into the equation.
He also points out that growth in the use of multimedia messaging services (MMS) could be dulled by operators introducing access only through opt-in to ensure that children do not get access to pornographic material. Delaney says many service providers feel many users will be too embarrassed or apathetic to opt in, significantly reducing the target audience.
IT consultants AMS are also critical. "We looked at branding and the portfolio of services and concluded that operators are not dedicating significant investment to SMS to encourage developers of third-party services. This is holding up application development," says senior telecoms consultant Jamie Bridel.
But even if texting gets the investment some believe it needs to reach a bigger business market, it may be overshadowed by the rise of new Push to Talk services.
