Brits Send 11 Million SMS Per Hour

A report published by the Mobile Data Association show that in 2009, users of mobile phone in the UK have sent 265 million short message texts on average per day in 2009.

In total, nearly 97 billion text messages were sent in whole of last year with a mere 600 million picture messages exchanged.

This shows that they are not as popular possibly because the quality of the photos exchanged and because of the rise of mobile internet deals which allows users to send pictures via email instead of SMS.

In 2007 and 2008, 57 billion and 79 billion texts were sent, which means that the rate of increase from 2008 to 2009 decreased (+22bn and +18bn respectively).

Steve Reynolds, chairman of MDA said in a statement that "These statistics show that even with new social media forms of messaging such as Twitter and Facebook, people are using SMS as a social messaging tool because of its simplicity and ubiquity."

As expected, text messaging traffic reached peaks last year around Christmast day (442m, +31 percent YoY), New Year's Eve & New Year's day (874m, +21 percent YoY).

Singularly, 4.5 million pictures messages were sent on Christmas day 2009 itself, roughly three times normal average last year.