It’s not quite as easy as it once was to astonish me, but one stat from last week managed it.

One of my hobby-horses is the question of music downloads over mobiles – a subject that annoys me a lot, because so many people are so excited about it, when there’s nothing of substance to get excited by. Anyway, last week I had to sit through a particularly inane presentation by someone who was actually suggesting that people use their mobiles not just to download pop tracks, but pop videos. The thing is, a mobile phone is about the most expensive possible tool to use for buying music, and the idea that fools downloading music and videos off iTunes will bring golden profits to mobile operators is absurd.

The figure that made me sit up and gasp was the size of the texting business. Projections show that the next five years will see SMS revenues reach nearly $70bn globally. This is roughly double the size of the global music business. Not the music download business, the entire music business – Universal, Sony, Warner, EMI and the rest. Indeed, music downloads to mobiles in the form of ringtones currently only accounts for about five percent of the music business.

Meanwhile, all the mobile propaganda paints a rosy picture of a golden age just round the corner, where mobile data traffic becomes bigger and more profitable than voice. And yet, right now, the mobile operators are making more money from data traffic than they will ever do again.

All the pointers show that customers are going to do more of that sort of communication over the broadband internet, not over mobile. Texting, the most profitable peer-to-peer messaging system ever imagined, is under threat from instant messengers – even though the competing messenger owners refuse to co-operate for now.

All those figures are small change compared with what we spend on voice phone calls. And one of the really encouraging features of the recent 3GSM show in Barcelona was the number of people there who have finally smelled that pot of coffee, and stopped making asinine predictions about the importance of mobile data, and are getting back to their knitting.

Now ask me what I think about TV on mobile networks...