Justin Horrocks
Canada may be the birthplace of the BlackBerry and mobile e-mail, and we're among the world's most obsessed users of Facebook, but it hasn't stopped us from engaging in a relatively old-school form of electronic messaging: texting.
In fact, texting on cellphones is bigger than ever.
According to the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association, 56.4 billion texts were sent in Canada in 2010, up 60 per cent from the 35.3 billion sent the previous year.
Of those texts sent in 2010, about 2.3 billion were of the common short code text variety, which are often used to interact with businesses and charities. That was up 36 per cent over 2009.
While year-over-year growth in texting is still very high, the overall rate is slowing.
The number of texts sent in 2009 was up 70 per cent over the previous year, and in 2008 there was an annual increase of 105 per cent.
In December 2010, the average cellphone subscriber sent 235 person-to-person text messages.