15 million texters ring in new year

IRISH people sent a staggering 15 million text messages on New Year's Eve at a cost of more than €2m.

PPL (that's people to all those non-texters out there) rang in the new year by sending more than 15 million text and picture msgs (messages) to wish ATB (all the best) to friends and family.

Vodafone facilitated the largest amount of text messages as more than 7.7 million texts were sent by their network users. O2 came a close second with another seven million messages sent on its network, while owners of Meteor phones fired-off a further 600,000 goodwill messages.

According to the experts, the three million mobile phone owners in the country sent an average of five text messages each on New Year's Eve.

Many took advantage of the send to all feature on their phone to greet every person in their electronic phonebook.

"There's definitely a big increase in text messaging this Christmas, and it just seems to be getting more popular all the time," said Jill Johnston of O2.

Last year each Irish mobile phone user sent an average of 65 text messages each month. The overall number of text messages for 2002 is expected to top 2.34 billion, a massive increase on 1.5 billion in 2001.

Text messages have become a standard way of marking festive events. The advantage of using a text message to send best wishes to friends or casual acquaintances is that it can be done at the press of a button rather than spending hours on the phone.

On Christmas Day, 700,000 text messages were sent on the Meteor network and five million on O2's network. Last year, 2.4 million messages were sent on St Valentine's Day, although embarrassingly, more than 200,000 of these were sent to the wrong person.

The popularity of text messages, which can cost between 9 cent and 13 cent, has provided much needed revenue for mobile phone operators. The 15 million texts sent on New Year's Eve ensured a prosperous start to the year's finances for mobile phone companies here, boosting their revenues by more than 2m. Vodafone and O2 both offered free picture messaging over the Christmas to boost sales.