Vodafone, O2 and Meteor celebrated the New Year with a €2.5 million windfall as mobile subscribers sent 22 million text and picture messages in a single day.
This amounts to an average of five texts sent by every person living in the Republic, reflecting the public's continuing love affair with mobile phones.
Figures released yesterday by the three Irish mobile firms show they also enjoyed an extremely profitable Christmas Day when 16.8 million text and picture messages were sent by customers.
Vodafone said the busiest hour for texting over Christmas was between 11 p.m. and midnight on New Year's Eve, when it recorded more than one million messages. The firm, which has 1.8 million Irish subscribers, said the 9.9 million messages sent on New Year's Eve were a 12.5 per cent increase on the same day in 2003.
O2, which has 1.3 million customers, said it had recorded 47.6 million text and picture messages sent by its subscribers in the nine days between Christmas Eve and New Year's Day. The firm said the nine million messages it recorded on New Year's Eve in 2004, beat the 8.2 million messages recorded a year earlier.
Meteor said it recorded three million text messages on New Year's Eve and two million text messages on Christmas Day.
Vodafone charged subscribers between 8 cents and 13 cents for each text sent over Christmas. O2 charged between 7.5 cents and 13 cents. Meteor charged nine cents.
Christmas is traditionally a time when people use their mobile phones more than usual for text messaging. However, it remains unclear how popular picture and photo messaging was this Christmas, as firms did not release any detailed data.
O2's text message data released to The Irish Times included figures for so-called multimedia messages (MMS), while Vodafone's statistics did not include MMS in its overall text figures.
Commission for Communication Regulation (ComReg) statistics show that texts sent by Irish subscribers have almost tripled over the past four years.
In the third quarter of 2004, Irish people sent 921 million texts compared to just 380 million texts in the equivalent quarter during 2001.
