Millions text their Christmas greetings

The number of Christmas text messages sent from Swiss phones reached record highs this year, with 1.1 per cent more going out than on December 24 and 25, 2010.

There were 74.4 million text and multimedia messages sent via the three Swiss operators on the two days this year. Orange and Sunrise reported higher numbers than during the same period in 2010, but Swisscom had 7.5 per cent fewer messages.

Swisscom had a record Christmas and Christmas Eve in 2010, but this year volume dropped from 29.5 million to 27.3 million messages over the two days. Spokesman Olaf Schulze said it was a result of the popularity of social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter.  More messages were also being sent on smartphone instant messaging technologies such as Whatsapp, Ping and iMessage.

The other main mobile phone operators in Switzerland however remained unaffected by such trends. Orange customers sent 23.1 million texts and 950,000 multimedia messages, which together represented an 8.1 per cent increase on the same period in 2010.

Sunrise said 21.3 million texts  and 1.8 million multimedia messages were sent, 6.3 per cent more texts than in 2010.