Text messaging remains just as popular for sending your best wishes! Between 8pm on 31st December 2011 and 8am on 1st January 2012, the Mobistar network handled a total of 47.1 million text messages (of which 20.3 million were sent by Mobistar customers). This represents an increase of 4,1% on the 45.4 million texts handled in the same period one year ago. Message sending peaked at midnight.
A sign of the times: the success of smartphones and tablets, which enable us to connect to social networks and the Internet from wherever we are, is increasingly reflected in the network usage figures for the night of New Year’s Eve. Between 8pm and 8am, mobile data traffic on the Mobistar network totalled 726,750 MB (102,009 MB in uplink and 624,741 MB in downlink).
Mobistar actively prepared to deal with the rush of best wishes sent electronically. As was the case last year, the Mobistar network was able to absorb up to 3,000 text messages per second. To ensure that messages reached their intended recipients as quickly as possible, various services were temporarily suspended during the night (message received alerts, missed call notifications, top-ups of pre-paid cards), while the network was temporarily adapted to give priority to SMS traffic over voice calls. Mobistar also reinforced the human means at its disposal: during the night of New Year’s Eve there were four times more engineers on duty in the network’s control centre, while around thirty additional technicians were kept on standby throughout the night. What better way to see in the New Year of 2012!