Will you welcome 2011 in a highly textual frenzy, as usual?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 30 December 2010 10:07

Your IT - Mobility

While some will ring in the new year with a kiss, others will be heavily texting, sending and receiving text messages at what is, as always, predicted to be the biggest number yet: 74 million text messages, 8 million more than last year!

SMS message frenzies are always predicted for New Year's Eve and New Year's Day, and while Telstra is predicting more than 74 million SMS messages will be sent this NYE and NYD, what happened when we welcomed in 2009 and then 2010?

Take a look for yourself. In my article from 30 December 2008, Telstra predicted 76 million messages would be send between the crossing over of 2008 to 2009. Clearly that didn't happen or last year's 66m messages wouldn't have been a record.

On the 30th of December, 2009, my article saw Telstra predicting there'd be 66 million messages sent from the time 2009 ended until the time 2010 began - perhaps it was the global financial crisis that caused the drop.

So, while we seem to have gone slightly backwards, there are still tens of millions of SMS messages being sent, with Telstra saying the 74m expected to be sent this year is still 8 million more than last year's figure.

Telstra's other figures are that, over 'New Year's Eve and New Year's Day', its customers will:

- make around 32.6 million mobile calls; up from 31 million last year
- make more than 26,000 video calls; up from 25,000 last year
- send more than 1.4 million picture messages; up from 850,000 last year

Rebekah O'Flaherty, Telstra's Executive Director of the Consumer Division, naturally made no mention of the 76m prediction from the end of 2008, and instead said that this year's SMS prediction 'was approximately 42 million more than what was sent over the same period five years ago', something that is nevertheless quite a big bit of messaging growth, and for telcos, probably still quite profitable considering how expensive SMS messages are to send compared with plain ol' data, although again, Telstra naturally doesn't mention that.

Continued on page two, please read on!