The use of mobile data to send New Year’s greetings has never been more popular. With most of us now having smartphones, many of us now use messaging or social media apps to convey our greetings to our nearest and dearest. New Year’s Eve mobile data consumption on the Proximus network was 30% up on New Year's Eve 2023. Proximus customers used a total of 532,675 gigabytes of mobile data, while the Orange network processed 576,866 gigabytes of mobile data, an increase of 17% on last year.
In a statement released on Wednesday, Orange said that “The most popular applications for sharing greetings remain Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. SnapChat and WhatsApp round off the top five”. Although the number of text messages (SMS) is continuing to fall year on year, texting remains a popular means of exchanging New Year's greetings, if the figures from the country's two main operators are to be believed.
On Wednesday Proximus reported that “The volume of text messages was around 70% higher than on a normal night,” The telecoms company recorded 5,434,014 text messages exchanged between 8pm on 31 December and 8am on 1 January.
On the Orange network, a total of 6.3 million text messages were sent between 8pm on 31/12/24 and 8am on 1/1/25. This represents a 50% increase on last year. “At midnight there was a peak of 2,604 text messages per second” Orange reports.
Meanwhile, the number of telephone calls made was down on last year. A total of 4,106,257 calls were made via the Proximus network (-3%). On the Orange network, 4.7 million telephone calls were made between 8pm and 8am a fall of 8% on last year.