Traffic over the cellular networks increased substantially over the festive season in comparison with the same period in 2002.
Vodacom saw an increase of 30%, with approximately 100 million SMSs being sent over Christmas and New Year. The amount of text messages sent on the MTN network during this period increased by over 60% to 24 million. Cell C says more than double the amount of SMSs were sent on its network, reaching 11 million.
Donovan Smith, MTN consumer GM, says although MTN did increase the capacity of its core SMS infrastructure by about 30%, the large increase in the amount of messages being sent resulted in some delays.
"The longest delay experienced on Christmas Day was six hours, while on New Year`s Eve and New Year`s Day, the maximum delay was 80 minutes.
"Delays were mainly caused by people switching their phones off and the servers had to keep re-routing the SMS until the phone was switched on again. If users` phones remained off for a long period of time then their SMSs were deleted to allow other SMSs in the queue to be sent."
Smith says more than 820 million calls were carried successfully on MTN`s network over December, with 29 million successful calls being made on Christmas Day, an increase of 58% from the previous year. Calls made on New Year`s Eve and New Year`s Day increased by 61% to 13 million calls.
Smith attributes the growth in the amount of traffic to a growing subscriber base, the SMS a-fella campaign and the MTN ICE Box SMS pre-booking service.
Vodacom reports an increase of 30% over Christmas and New Year, which was in line with its expectations. However, the volume of traffic over its network was still much higher because of Vodacom`s larger subscriber base.
Cell C COO Fred Coetzer says that while specific festive season statistics are not available yet, SMS traffic on the Cell C network increased by more than four times the usual load.
"Over Christmas and New Year, over 11 million SMSs were successfully sent, while the number of calls being made around midnight on New Year jumped from around 200 000 call attempts an hour to over 700 000," he says.
Coetzer says comparing figures from 2002 will have little meaning as Cell C`s subscriber base more than doubled to 2.6 million in 2003.
Related story:
Mobile networks gear up for holidays
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