Juniper Research forecasts that by 2022, 25% of all SMS traffic will be A2P (Application to Person), up 17.7% from 2017 with a 6.9% CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate).
In the report A2P Messaging: Opportunities, Competition & Forecasts 2017-2022 Juniper also says that the volume of A2P messaging will increase by 20% over the next 5 years to more than 2.7 trillion by 2022, up from 2.1 trillion in 2017.
Juniper attributes the growth to an increase in automated marketing, payments and authentication messages.
The researcher defines A2P as an automated SMS message sent from an enterprise to an end user. Historically, A2P was used for alerts and, as PSMS (Premium SMS), as a billing mechanism and carrier for simple content and services, for one-off downloads or actions (e.g. voting) as well as for recurring payments.
OTT players are heavy users of A2P messaging, generating billions of traffic per annum in their use of A2P messaging for 2FA (two-factor authentication) and to re-engage users who have abandoned their messaging application or changed device.
Juniper says this increase of enterprise messaging over OTT applications will subsequently create a new use case for A2P SMS traffic. User verifications and OTPs (One Time Passwords) will require the ubiquitous nature of SMS services as a starting point. This suggests that there is still some life in SMS.