China: 14 billion messages

Two leading Chinese telecom providers have estimated that Chinese people will send about 14 billion Tet messages during the 7-day New Year holiday.

Statistics from China Mobile and China Unicom said they had well prepared the telecommunications network to avoid possible network congestion.

Statistics from the Ministry of Information show that in 2006, Chinese people sent 429.6 billion SMS messages via mobile phones, an average of 1.2 billion messages a day, equivalent to collected over 100 billion yuan for telecom providers.

Last Tet, Chinese people sent a total of 12.6 billion SMS messages in 8 days - on average each person sent more than 30 of the 400 million mobile phone users.

In 2006, the number of mobile phone users in China increased by an average of 5.64 million monthly, bringing the total to more than 460 million, accounting for 35.3% of the country's population.

Manh Ha