Short-messaging services (SMS) in Hong Kong are gaining in popularity, with huge numbers of text messages sent during the Lunar New Year holiday.
More than two months after making their SMS systems interoperable, Hong Kong's six mobile-phone networks saw inter-operator text traffic rise to almost 850,000 messages on February 12 - the first day of the Year of the Horse.
Communications software vendor Comverse, which provides the platform underpinning interoperator SMS in the SAR, said that number followed the strong traffic patterns operators had recorded since Christmas.
Yossi Shabat, Comverse Asia-Pacific vice-president, said: 'We recorded more than 260,000 on the eve of the Lunar New Year. This peaked on New Year's Day at 849,000, which is the largest number of text messages recorded since interoperator SMS was launched in Hong Kong.'
Although there was a slight drop in SMS use on the second day of the holiday, more than 350,000 messages were sent on St Valentine's Day, Mr Shabat said.
A spokesman for Hutchison Telecom, which has a market-leading subscriber base of 1.7 million out of the total 5.4 million mobile-phone users in Hong Kong, estimated the company's SMS traffic reached 1.6 million during the four-day holiday, which ended on February 14.