Brussels, 1 January 2009 - People increasingly choose to send their New Year’s wishes by text message at the end of the year. This year, Mobistar customers sent a total of 23.6 million SMS’s between Dec. 31 8 p.m. and Jan. 1 8 a.m. In order to accommodate the rise in network traffic, Mobistar raised the capacity of its SMS server and also installed a buffer system.
Mobistar customers increasingly choose to send their wishes by text message, continuing last year’s trend. On Christmas Eve, between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m., Mobistar customers sent 12.43 million text messages, 36 % more than the 9.14 million messages sent the previous year. The total for 24 and 25 December 2008, over a 48-hour period, amounted to 47.8 million SMS’s, compared with 34.46 million for the equivalent period in 2007, amounting to a 38.7 % rise.
On New Year’s Eve too the number of SMS wishes was quite high. The total number of text messages sent between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. was 23.6 million, or a 30.4 % increase compared with last year. The peak came around midnight, with an SMS traffic flow of 2000 SMS/sec. Mobistar took the requisite technical measures, meaning the SMS server’s capacity was raised up to 124,000 SMS’s a minute. Next to this, the operator also provided for a buffer of 6.6 million SMS’s. The capacity of the Mobistar network was sufficiently high to deal with the flow of calls and text messages. All text messages were delivered in time.
Mobistar also expects an increase compared with last year as regards the number of text messages sent over a 48-hour period (31/12 and 1/1). This year too, text messages as a means of conveying New Year’s wishes has been exceedingly popular.