O2 announced today that a record number – 166,000,000 – of text messages were sent over its network during the 24-hour period ending at 7.30am on New Year’s Day. That’s 1,900 a second, but obviously in the hour or so around the New Year, that will have been considerably higher.

Extrapolating out a bit, given three and a half other major phone networks, that means that something like half a billion messages were sent in the UK in a 24-hour period. I’m an O2 customer, and had a perfectly fine phone conversation just after midnight with no connection problems whatsoever. If you’ve got a system that can cope with that, and survive unscathed, then I salute you.

O2 Media Centre (via @O2UKOfficial)

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