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According to , which is well placed to comment on such matters as it is a provider of mobile messaging infrastructure amongst other things, the SMS (short message service) we all better know as text messaging will hit record highs on New Years Day.

In fact, you can think of January 1st 2008 as being the SMS Text Olympics. But who will the winners be?

Well, according to the bean counters at Airwide at least, the US is expected to hit a staggering 730 million messages sent on the big day while the UK will put in a credible performance of 280 million messages or put another way, 4.6 texts per capita!

The gold medal candidate has to be China though, despite the official Chinese New year not happening until later in the year. However, Airwide estimate that SMS volumes for China will be the usual daily figure of, wait for it, 1.6 billion texts sent.

Switzerland sends seven times as many messages on New Year's Day than average, making it the best at texting greetings to family and friends, and is expected to hit 75 million messages. Belgium looks like doubling its previous best New year figure and sending 46.7 million texts, while the Czech Republic is predicted to tap out 55 million.

The French send a healthy 55 million messages on New Year's Day, but that is actually just a normal day for them. Which either means that as a nation they are hugely warm and friendly all year round, or a miserable bunch when it comes to ringing in the New Year. OK, it could also mean that they prefer to actually shake hands with family and friends and greet them face to face I guess…

Jay Seaton, CMO of Airwide Solutions, told me that "Airwide was involved in the sending of the first ever SMS message, fifteen years ago this December. Back then no-one anticipated it to become so prolific. Mobile messaging, led by SMS, still continues to grow and is now complimented by multimedia mobile messaging, mobile marketing, location based services and now mobile instant messaging. New Year is usually the biggest peak in messaging every year and this year will be no exception."

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This thread reproduces an industry forecast about a New Year SMS surge. Vendor forecasts can be a useful planning signal, but headlines often hide the counting rules and assumptions that drive the numbers. posted the press release; 's follow-up about mobile services is relevant — peaks like these matter to anyone building messaging, LBS, or notification systems.

Watch how counts are compiled. Typical issues to check include sampling basis (gateway logs vs carrier records), whether messages are counted as segments or as logical messages (concatenation), how retries and delivery-reports are treated, what timezone window defines the "day", and whether machine-generated traffic (short codes, OTPs, automated alerts) is included. Any one of those choices can materially change a headline figure.

If you want to evaluate a claim, ask the vendor for methodology: raw counts or extrapolation factors, whether counts are mobile-originated or mobile-terminated, how concatenation and retries were handled, and the exact time window used. Cross-check vendor claims with operator or regulator reports where available, and look for independent trade-press coverage. For developers and planners (as suggested), use vendor peaks to drive capacity tests: simulate realistic bursts, implement backoff and rate-limiting, monitor delivery latency closely, and design graceful degradation for high-load periods.

Quick utility — compute per-capita SMS from a CSV (country,messages,population) with this simple Python snippet:

# compute per-capita SMS from CSV: country,messages,population
import csv

rows = []
with open('sms.csv') as f:
    for country, messages, population in csv.reader(f):
        per_capita = float(messages) / int(population)
        rows.append((country, per_capita))

for c, p in sorted(rows, key=lambda x: x[1], reverse=True):
    print(f"{c}: {p:.3f}")

Treat vendor peaks as useful signals, not gospel — confirm the counting rules before using numbers for capacity planning or cost estimates.

Member Avatar for rakeeit

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