With the transition from old to new, many people reach for their smartphones to send New Year’s greetings around. According to the telecom operators, they mainly use their mobile data and social media for this. But the old-fashioned calling also made a comeback. The SMS stays on its way back.
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Text and data traffic has traditionally experienced a surge in the transition from December 31 to January 1. This is also apparent this year from the figures of the various telecom operators in our country. It is remarkable that Proximus and Orange also registered a significant increase in the number of ‘classic’ telephone calls.
At telecom operator Telenet, 3,842,174 text messages were counted between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. and 168,037 GB of data were used. SMS continues to lose popularity at Telenet (-11.11 percent), while mobile data increased by almost 68 percent. According to Telenet, customers mainly sent New Year’s greetings via applications such as WhatsApp and Facebook.
At Orange Belgium, data traffic peaked to 258,000 GB, an increase of 22.7 percent compared to last year. Facebook accounted for 46 percent of the total data volume, followed by Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and Whatsapp. The SMS does hold up for Orange customers. Orange customers sent 5.6 million text messages, a slight increase of 2.4 percent.
But what, according to Orange, is particularly striking is the ‘comeback’ of ordinary calling. With nearly 3.3 million calls made, it was an increase of more than 55 percent. “This is probably because people celebrate in smaller bubbles in these corona times and want to involve other family members in the festivities,” said Orange.
Also at Proximus, the number of regular mobile calls on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Eve was 30 percent higher than last year. Mobile data traffic increased by 35 percent to 243,580 GB. Proximus speaks of a doubling in three years’ time.
Proximus also processed 7.2 million text messages. That is a slight decrease of 2 percent. But in five years’ time, the number of New Year’s messages at Proximus has also more than halved.
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