Happy New Year text messages going out of style

Wishing others a happy New Year by text message appears to be heading the way of the DoDo bird. Three of Belgium’s mobile phone providers are reporting fewer messages sent to bring in 2014 than in year’s past. The fall maybe a sign that sending texts has given way to other methods of social media, despite existing numbers remaining in the millions.

Only Telenet maintained its text message numbers, with significant drops seen amongst its competitors. Proximus is showing a drop of 2.8 million texts, down from 30 million last year, with Mobistar down half a million with 23.5 million texts, and Base reporting 13.4 million sent, down 700 thousand from last year.

Telenet actually showed a significant increase, with 5.8 million texts sent on New Year’s Eve, an increase of 1.5 million messages.

Despite the reported drops, New Year’s remains the busiest day of the year for text messages. In an average day during the year, the number of messages sent hovers in the single digits of millions.