Belgians call, text and app New Year’s wishes

Proximus handled more than 7.1 million text messages on its network last night, twice as many as on a normal night in 2022. The steady decline of recent years seems to be stagnating (-1 percent compared to last year), the company said in a statement. a press release. Orange processed 5.4 million New Year’s wishes via SMS, a decrease of 3.8 percent year-on-year. At the peak, at midnight, 977 messages were sent per second. By way of comparison: in 2018, people at Orange still sent 10 million text messages from old to new.

Orange also notes that people prefer to call each other personally to make wishes. In those 12 hours, 5.1 million telephone calls were made, 57 percent more than in the same period last year. Proximus counted 4.2 million mobile calls (+57 percent), a figure that again reached the pre-corona level. “This could indicate that people were celebrating more often outside the home again.” The increase in mobile data traffic continues. Proximus reports an increase of almost 20 percent in mobile data exchanged compared to last year. Orange processed 326,179 GB of mobile data, an increase of 26 percent, with the most popular wish-sharing apps being Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. At Proximus, fixed internet traffic increased by 11 percent.

Telenet, the third most important operator, already decided last year not to provide the figures anymore.