O2 rings in the New Year with 166 million SMSs

Telefónica O2 in the UK just announced on the New Year, 1,900 text messages were sent every second.

Over a 24 hours period, 166 million SMSs were sent, with their records ending on 7:30 January 1st. No news if this has set a new record and no one was on hand from O2 to deny or confirm this. Unfortunately no other UK carrier has made public yet their stats producing a more rounded figure.

Just to put this in comparison elsewhere on the planet we went a search’in, where stats came in of a similar nature showing text messages are now preferable to actually calling someone on NYE.

In Sweden over 24 million messages were sent during New Years Eve, over the state owned network Telia. Their other main carrier Tele2, showed a number almost reaching 28.4 million – this hit a new record for that country.

The Netherlands Vodafone division had an increase of 52 percent from last year, with their figures for text messaging coming in at 22 million over that night. T-Mobile, the other largest faction recorded a third increase on the previous year’s takings, with 19 million SMSs being sent.

More closer to home, Orange in France clocked up 66 million in just four hours from 9pm to 2am.
The other major network in France SFR hit 18.1 million SMSs, up 36 percent on last year.

Whilst Bouygues Telecom saw between midnight and 1am 15 million text messages, on a 100 percent increase from the year before.

In Belgium 78.3 million text messages were sent to the Belgian network, where only the year before just 59.3 million SMSs were sent.

In Switzerland they saw 54.5 million text messages sent over all their networks. 25 million SMSs went across the Swisscom carrier until midnight, with their Orange network seeing 13.6 million.

Thailand hit the 50 million SMS mark, and surprisingly one million MMS were transmitted from December 31 2008 to January 1 2009.

All told, text messaging seems a hit this year and rightly so. Why spend the next hour at midnight calling people to wish them a happy new year, whilst going straight to voicemail each time as everyone else has the same idea.

Instead, fire off a few dozen SMSs and hope everyone does the same thing. Or in the case of Thailand, take a picture of yourself wishing people a happy new year (?) and send that instead.

Happy New Year

From sources – Sweden, Netherlands, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Thailand