The Hindu Business Line : Ringing in the New Year with over a billion SMS

New Delhi, Jan. 1 It was a happy beginning to the New Year for mobile operators. More than a billion short messages are estimated to have been exchanged over the past 2 days as over 200 million mobile subscribers punched in their New Year wishes to their loved ones.

The number of SMS touches a new high at the beginning of every year. This time, the operators claim that they were prepared to carry the traffic. “We had beefed up our network to handle much more than the normal day’s traffic,” said a GSM operator in New Delhi.

They said there was some relief as a number of subscribers chose to send their greetings 2 or 3 days in advance. According to experts, while most telecom networks have the capacity to handle even a 200-per cent increase from the normal day peak-hour traffic, on New Year eve or during festive season such as Diwali, networks record a 300-per cent increase .

Therefore, subscribers continued to face a clogged network across the country. While some complained of receiving the same message from the same contact more than twice, others said messages sent took more than half a day to reach the destinations. And those trying to talk to their friends at midnight found that the calls were just not going through.

The operators said the problem was not unique to India as cellular service providers across the world face a congested network on New Year eve. In 2007, authorities in some countries such as Spain, advised their mobile consumers to send their greetings in advance or use e-mail instead. Of course, the operators laughed their way to the bank with the networks running at full capacity. At an average Re 1 per message, the SMSs mean a Rs 100-crore windfall for the operators.

This is good news for the cellular companies who have been facing a decline in SMS usage over the past few quarters. According to TRAI, the average number of SMS being sent per subscriber had declined by 11 per cent to 31 per month.

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