New Year’s Eve revelers used their mobiles, smartphones and tablets en masse to send New Year’s greetings, say the main mobile phone providers. As expected, use of Facebook, Twitter and Whatsapp caught up further to text messages. In total, Proximus, Mobistar, Base and Telenet clients sent around 62 million text messages between 8pm on Wednesday and 8am on Thursday. It’s an impressive figure, but a large drop from last year, when around 70 million text messages were sent. It’s also the second year in a row that the number of text messages sent at New Year has fallen. Data traffic from mobiles has, on the other hand, considerably increased.
Proximus, the main operator, recorded around 23.5 million text messages on its network, a fall of 13% compared to last year. The volume of data exchanged (text and images) via social media has increased by 250% to 17.6 million MBs.
Mobistar clients sent 21.3 million text messages, around 10% less than going into 2014. They also exchanged 14 million MBs, an increase of 165%.
Base Company clients sent 11 million text messages last night (-18%) and used a little less than 10 million MBs (+90%)
“Base Company clients have completely adapted to the new mobile way of life and send greetings through social media more and more using mobile networks. Often, people send greetings without waiting until the evening”, said the CEO Jos Donvil.
Finally, Telenet clients sent 6 million text messages during the festivities, a slight increase. It recorded 12 million MBs used, an increase of 500%.
The operators, who took measures to deal with the peak in activity on their networks, recorded no technical problems.
Jonadav Apelblat
Business and Technology Editor
The Brussels Times
