Sybase says all your SMS are belong to the Royals

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 02 May 2011 12:21

Your IT - Mobility

Although the Royal Wedding saw 'expected social media surges' in Twitter and Facebook, Sybase 365 says 'no-one could predict the increases in US and UK SMS/MMS traffic'.

Whenever there's a major, global event, you can always expect big increases in traffic, not only to official sites but also to social networking sites.

Sybase365, which says it is 'the global leader in mobile messaging and mobile commerce services', has put out some stunning stats that, apparently, no-one foresaw.

Sybase says that there was a '600% increase in daily SMS/MMS traffic between combined US and UK markets at the start of the Royal Wedding, drifting down to just over double towards the end of the ceremonies'.

Next up is the claim that 'US carriers nationally experienced 31% increase in SMS/MMS traffic at the start of the Royal Wedding - big numbers considering the times on the East and West coasts when the events kicked off.'

Then we're told that the 'the top two destinations for MMS related traffic from the UK were Australia and Ireland'.

Finally, we see that 'Ireland originated traffic showed a slight (20-30%) rise in traffic.'

Sybase 365 says it captured 'the minute-by-minute domestic US and UK SMS/MMS traffic', and that 'when looking at the UK traffic alone, the four hour traffic window captured for the Royal Wedding ranks second in SMS/MMS events for the country in 2011 - astonishing when compared to the full 24 hours for each New Year's 2011, Easter and Valentine's Day, to date.

Below is a graph from Sybase 365 that illustrates this point.

Sybase 365 also takes the opportunity in its press release to press home exactly what it is that Sybase can do for telcos, saying that the combo of its 'Sybase IQ and Sybase 365 Operator Analytics provides operators a near-real-time view of their messaging operations and makes it fast and easy to run complex queries on their high-volume, high-capacity data store.  The company's real-time analytics and operator services are what made this monitoring possible.'

Sybase 365 also notes that this is not the first time it has 'employed these services', saying that it 'monitored the spread [of] SMS vital to the revolutions in Egypt and Libya, to the way text messaging played a crucial role in rescue efforts in Christchurch'.

So, on the Royal Wedding day, at least, all your SMS and MMS were belong to the Royals, but things are probably very much now back to normal, and your SMS, MMS and all your bases are belong back to you.