UK Celebrates With Text

While a significant portion of the global population celebrated the arrival of 2004 with parties, kisses and revelry, UK mobile users were texting their good wishes to each other. The Mobile Data Association (MDA) reports that a text messaging record was set on New Year’s Day 2004 when 111 million celebratory greetings were sent.

The record-breaking figure represents an 8 percent increase over New Year’s day 2003, when 102 million messages were sent. However, there was a whopping 59 percent increase over the first day of 2002 and the first day of 2003.

Used as an efficient and cost-effective method for exchanging greetings, short message service (SMS) [define] exploded across the UK in the years since 1992 when the first text message was reportedly sent. The MDA found that UK mobile phone owners send an average of 56 million text messages in a typical day across the four UK GSM [define] networks – O2, Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone – with roughly 2.3 million sent every hour.

The MDA measured 16.8 billion chargeable person-to-person text messages were sent across the four UK GSM networks in 2002, with predictions of 20 billion text messages during 2003, and expectations of roughly 24 billion in 2004.

Holidays and sporting events are found to be among the highest text messaging days for mobile users in the UK. In addition to the staggering New Year’s Day figures, the holidays that had high SMS volume were Valentine’s Day and St. Patrick’s Day.