SMS kisses reach record high

New Year's party in Lucerne Keystone

Swiss cellphone users bombarded family and friends with SMS New Year's greetings, putting mobile phone operators to test.

Twenty-one million short messages were sent in Switzerland during a 24-hour period through the three mobile phone operators Swisscom, Orange and Sunrise, beating the previous record by one million.

The Swiss sent a total of 42 million messages over the two day (New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day) period.

Swisscom spokesman Christian Neuhaus said that 12 million short messages went through Swisscom smoothly in the hours leading up to midnight on December 31st.

An onslaught of messages between midnight and half past led to some delivery delays. However, the system, which normally delivers around seven million SMS messages a day to 3,5 million Swisscom clients dissolved the backlog within the hour.

Orange also hit a record high with over four million short text messages delivered in the “hot” period, which started around 11pm on New Year’s Eve and extended until close to 1am.

The nine hundred thousand Orange clients were able to send their New Year kisses without a slip between hand and lip. Orange spokeswoman Therese Wenger said operations went smoothly throughout the night.

The third Swiss mobile phone operator also experienced the message sending frenzy, but contrary to its counterparts the message-making really fired up after midnight.

Sunrise dealt with 5.5 million messages in the run up to 2002. However, on the first day of the new year 6.7 million messages were sent between midnight and 7am.

Sunrise spokeswoman Monika Walser said their system is able to channel approximately two million SMS messages per hour for 835,000 clients, therefore no jams were recorded.

swissinfo with agencies