KEY POINTS:
The fingers were flying on New Year's Eve.
The New Zealand population went texting mad over the festive period, with millions of messages flying throughout the country and further afield.
Vodafone spokesman Paul Brislen said that between 10pm on December 31 and 2am on January 1, the Vodafone network carried 13.5 million text messages.
With modern phones having the ability to send multiple text messages at once, hundreds of messages could be instantly dispatched from the one phone.
Telecom was equally as busy. It was estimated the Telecom network handled 50,000 text messages in the first minute of 2008. Though exact details were unavailable, on New Year's Day the Telecom network was expected to have handled upwards of 19 million text messages. The average is 13 million per day.
With cellphone penetration at more than 100 per cent in New Zealand the numbers were not unexpected. Vodafone has about 2 1/2 million active customers, Telecom about two million.
The networks seemed to have worked reasonably well.
Mr Brislen said some messages might have been delayed as the networks got overloaded but should have eventually got through.
- Otago Daily Times
