Telcos up capacity for New Year

Many people will be sending New Year wishes through phonecalls and texts. Photo / Thinkstock

Kiwis are expected to ring in the New Year with the biggest deluge of text messages and emailed photos seen in this country.

Once, we celebrated by singing Auld Lang Syne and kissing strangers in the street. Now, we would rather exercise our thumbs to mark midnight on December 31.

Vodafone, which faced criticism for network issues earlier this year, has boosted capacity to deal with more than 24.5 million text messages.

Vodafone spokeswoman Emma Carter said the network had installed new cell sites and rolled out temporary ones to service the country's most popular holiday destinations, as well as augmenting 40 others to improve capacity.

According to Telecom spokesperson Holly Linell, the total number of New Year messages would be just over 20 million.

"Generally the Telecom network deals well with this big peak in traffic," she said.

Telecom said its users would exchange more than 70,000 text messages per minute between midnight December 31 and 6pm on January 1. This was more than four times the normal volume of a Friday night.

Tens of thousands of mobile tech-savvy Kiwis will also be sharing the New Year's best wishes via social networking sites.

Both telco giants have enhanced capacity to deal with the data load.