The FIFA World CUP & SMS usage

I wonder what effect the World Cup is having on mobile traffic. In April, the Mobile Data Association reported that there were 3.1 billion text messages sent in the UK alone. (Slightly lower, by the way, than the 3.2 billion sent in March).

Obviously we can’t get these stats in real time… although, do you know what, it would be brilliant to take a look at a worldwide message counter or transmission graph! There’s all sorts of commercial pressures which would, I’m sure, prevent anything like this from going live. However it would be really interesting to see the short term traffic effect of England playing Sweden tonight, for example.

I reckon we’ll definitely see a sizable usage spike. I was stuck on a packed train the other day trying to get home before the second England match started — we were all packed in like sardines — the entire carriage was vibrating and beeping for the 35 minute journey. There were copious ‘I’ll be home soon’, ‘Can you pick me up?’, ‘When does it start again?’ calls too.

10% uplift in gross traffic? Is that too much? I don’t think so.

It’d be really good to view the traffic spikes when various teams score across the 90 minutes too! Anyway it’ll be a few months before we get the figures.