Syniverse Technologies says it achieved a new messaging traffic milestone in the second quarter of 2010, as consumers worldwide turned to their mobile devices with even greater frequency to text and tweet with friends and family, share pictures and video, manage their financial accounts, and interact with their favorite brands. Syniverse moved an average of 1.6bn mobile messages per day in the second quarter of 2010, an increase of 23 per cent from a year ago.

The company’s peer-to-peer (P2P) messaging volumes, which include both short messaging service (SMS) and multimedia message service (MMS), were up 23 per cent quarter-over-quarter, with MMS traffic showing 202 per cent growth rate year over year. SMS traffic also achieved 22 per cent year-over-year gains.

“With SMS now enabled on nearly 100 per cent of the world’s handsets – both smart devices as well as inexpensive feature phones – all types of mobile providers as well as new entrants to mobile are motivated to take advantage of its broad reach,” says Syniverse CEO and president, Tony Holcombe.

Syniverse says that over the past few months, it has seen strong interest in messaging within Latin America, where more than 500m messaging-enabled mobile devices are currently active.

The company notes that evidence of this trend is supported by Portio Research’s Mobile Messaging Futures 2010-2014 report, which forecasts that SMS traffic in this part of the world will grow from 250.2bn messages in 2009, to 403.7bn messages in 2014, while MMS traffic is expected to grow from 1.8bn to messages to 5.7bn messages over the same period.