O2 sees a record 166 million text messages fly during New Year's celebration
by Darren Murph 
posted Jan 3rd 2009 at 5:07PM
If Americans really send twice as many text messages as Europeans, we'd hate to see the figures from the Big 4 here in the States. According to O2 UK, a record 166 million text messages were sent over its network in a 24-hour period that ended at 7:30AM on January 1, 2009. For those not exactly near their abacus, that breaks down to around 1,900 messages per second. Furthermore, over 16 million texts were saved by O2 subscribers using its own Bluebook backup service, though we can't imagine "HNY09!one1!1" messages being all that compelling to revisit, say, every day after 01/01/09.[Image courtesy of Israelity]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
cl347bv @ Jan 3rd 2009 5:27PM
holy shit.
thats a staggering amount of texting.
greenlight @ Jan 3rd 2009 6:37PM
And _this_ is why texting isn't charged the same as data. The servers powerful enough to store, route and forward 1900 messages a second don't come cheap.
Nippero @ Jan 3rd 2009 8:57PM
except theyre not powerful enough, not the US carrier servers anyway.
On New Years, my texts took over 20min to send and recieve. Didnt clear up until around 2:49AM.
My other friends were reporting similar problems, some not even able to call others. Quite BS
BOGY @ Jan 3rd 2009 8:22PM
Yeah, texting on the T68i was like way better than these dumb Blackberry things
Come on guys laugh please
JMcMusicman @ Jan 3rd 2009 10:29PM
VZW customers sent/received an average of 1 billion text messages per day in November 2008
D4bucks @ Jan 4th 2009 1:36PM
And you got this number where?
JMcMusicman @ Jan 4th 2009 2:13PM
I got the number from VZW Corp communications, but just do the math... 70.8 Million customers, that's only like 14 messages on average per customer per day...
TechoGeek @ Jan 4th 2009 1:42AM
whoaaaa........
thats just too many!
Maff @ Jan 5th 2009 9:25AM
compared to just the UK the US number will be massive since the figures in the story are only for the UK (one fifth the population of the USA)