Now that everyone in your family has a mobile phone, it should come as no shock to find out how much we’re all going to use it on NYE. And we’re all going to use phones a lot.
Telstra has said as much, with predictions that data ove the New Year’s Eve period will result in Australians collectively downloading 1500 terabytes of data, translating to 1.5 million gigabytes.
That is an astonishing amount of data, and it will join a good 47 million phone calls from mobiles and 91 million text messages sent, and most of the texting kicks off when the clock strikes midnight crossing over into the new year.
In fact, last year Telstra found over four million text messages were sent in the one hour space of midnight to 1am.
While Telstra’s data surge predictions are all kinds of expected, our hope is that the network will be able to hold up, and not just for Telstra, but for all carriers across Australia.
If yours does struggle, remember that a message sent out at midnight or one or two or even eight in the morning is still a message that’s been sent out, and while it’s nice to get in their early and first, saying “Happy New Year” to friends and families can happen any time.
Alternatively, our suggestion would be to ditch text altogether and head online.
It’s unlikely your 4G connection is going to struggle too much, and if you have access to WiFi, you can send out your messages over social media without so much drama, relying on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, or any other services you may regularly talk to friends and family on.
