Romanians who own a mobile phone seem to have forgotten the tradition of mailing greeting cards. SMS, and more recently, MMS are now all the rage.
During the winter holidays, the customers of the main mobile telephony operators, Connex-Vodafone and Orange, sent 81 million SMSs. Since the standard tariff for a text message stands at 7 cents, the two operators jointly derived revenues of more than 5 million euros from these greetings alone.
Users of the Connex-Vodafone network sent a total of 51 million text messages over the Christmas period – December 24-26, and for the New Year – December 31st, January 1st and 2nd. In other words, every user of the Connex-Vodafone network (which has, in line with the latest official data, 5.5 million users) sent almost 10 written messages on average, during the last days of December.
The operator”s officials did not calculate the number of messages sent by every user on Christmas and New Year”s Eve, but said that, during the December 24-26 period, the company registered growth by 103% from the corresponding period of 2004. At the same time, as winter holidays bring much higher data traffic as compared to regular days, the number of messages sent for Christmas in the Connex-Vodafone network rose by 293% from the previous week (December 17-19), according to the company officials.
In their turn, the 6.2 million customers of Orange sent 30 million text messages during the winter holidays. Thus, between December 24-26 a number of 15.6 million text messages were sent, accounting for a 72% increase from the corresponding period of last year, while during the December 31-January 2 period the number of sent messages amounted to 14.6 million.
The several hundred thousand users of the Zapp network also sent more text messages than they did the previous winter. Without disclosing the exact number of messages sent in this network, the company”s representatives said growth by 140-150% was seen during the winter holidays as compared with the previous year. At the same time, the number of messages sent during this period was five times higher than the number of messages sent on regular days.
Contacted by Ziarul Financiar, the officials of Cosmote Romania, which was re-launched on the market early last month, would not reveal the message traffic registered during the winter holidays period. mihai.musatoiu@zf.ro