New Year’s Eve Sees Britons Sending Record Texts

New Year’s Eve once again proved a popular night for text messages, as friends and family used the technology to send New Year wishes, with new figures from the Mobile Data Association (MDA) showing that the new year period enjoyed the largest daily total ever recorded.

According to the MDA, the total number of messages sent between midnight 31 December 2005 and midnight 1 January 2006 was a staggering 165 million, an average of 6.9 million per hour.

Person-to-person texts sent across the UK GSM network operators on New Year’s day 2006 showed a growth of 24% on last year’s figure of 133 million (see Record Number Of Text Messages Sent On New Year’s Day).

The MDA predicts text messaging’s strong performance to continue into this year, forecasting an average of three billion to be sent each month and 100 million sent per day, compared to an estimated 82 million per day in 2005. Overall, the mobile measuring body expects an annual total of 36.5 billion text messages for 2006.

Mobile Data Association: 01922 419600 www.mda-mobiledata.org