Vodafone and O2 – which between them share 94pc of Ireland’s mobile marketplace – last night revealed that between them almost 19 million text messages were sent across their networks on New Year’s Eve.
Vodafone last night revealed that it notched up more than 9.9 million text messages on New Year’s Eve. O2 provided siliconrepublic.com with figures that indicate it transmitted some nine million text messages on its network on New Year’s Eve, followed by a further 5.1 million messages on New Year’s Day.
Vodafone revealed that calls carried on its network exceeded a massive 18.4 million in total over Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve. Similarly, text messaging figures went through the roof with 8.4 million carried on Christmas Eve and 9.9 million sent over the network on New Year’s Eve. The busiest hour for text messaging, as anticipated, was between 11pm and midnight on 31 December, 2004 when more than one million texts were sent to ring in the New Year.
According to O2’s figures, some 6.4 million text messages were sent across its network on Christmas Day, up on the 6.1 million sent last year.
Across the entire Christmas holiday season, from 24 December, 2004 to 1 January, 2005, a total of 47.6 million text messages were sent across the O2 network. “The three-hour period from midnight on New Year’s Eve to 3am on New Year’s Day saw 1.8 million messages sent across the O2 network,” a spokesperson for O2 told siliconrepublic.com.
By John Kennedy
