A billion SMSes sent in a single day in Beijing
By IANSTuesday, February 8, 2011
BEIJING - About one billion text messages were sent in Beijing Wednesday on the eve of the Spring Festival. But, many who received the numerous messages were not amused, with one user saying: “There are so many! I felt touched at first, then just burdened to even have to read them”.
China’s major mobile phone operators said that about one billion SMSes were sent in Beijing alone on the eve of the Spring Festival, China’s biggest festival, the China Daily reported Tuesday.
China Mobile said its Beijing users sent 770 million text messages that night, which was up about 13 percent year-on-year.
China Unicom mobile users in the Chinese capital sent over 143 million messages during the day, and around 7 p.m. the firm was handling about 4,700 text messages per second.
China Mobile’s Shanghai users sent 920 million text messages on the same day, up 20 percent, while in Guangdong province, the number of messages sent Wednesday night went up by over 23 percent year-on-year, the media report said.
“God knows how many text messages I received on Spring Festival Eve, it must have been over a hundred. I even received many from people I don’t even know,” Yin Ni, who runs an online store in Beijing, was quoted as saying.
“I never send such messages because I don’t consider pressing the button saying ’send message to all contacts’ is sincere. People should realize that the only beneficiaries are the mobile phone operators,” said Yin.
Wang Shuhua, a primary school teacher in Shanxi province, said: “I can’t stand the frequent text message noises and so I just silenced my mobile phone.”
“There are so many! I’ve received up to 300 text messages for Spring Festival in recent years. I felt touched at first, then just burdened to even have to read them,” Wang said.
Liang Zhisheng, a police official in Shanxi, said that examples of many generic greetings are even available online for people to copy.
“No matter how witty they are, they can’t touch our hearts like those simple or plain words in your friends’ own writing,” said Liang.
