Despite a general surge in traffic density over the festive season, SA's cellphone operators say the period passed without any major hitches.
In line with an established year-on-year increase in cellphone activity, the total usage over the 2011 holiday period once again saw an increase when compared to Christmas and New Year 2010.
Vodacom's acting chief officer of corporate affairs, Tshepo Ramodibe, says the operator saw a traffic increase, with over 750 million phone calls and 310 million SMSes carried by the network over Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.
“Similar volumes were experienced over the New Year period. Data traffic sent during the festive period was also up substantially when compared to the same time last year.”
MTN, SA's second-largest cellphone operator, says, compared to 2010, it experienced about a 5.57% increase in total traffic density this Christmas Day. “[The network saw approximately] a 90.01% increase in MMSes, 8% in SMSes, and a 227% increase in data volumes.”
New Year's Day, says MTN, similarly experienced an approximate 4% increase total. “MMS volumes saw a 50% increase, SMS volumes increased by 10% and data by 200% [on 1 January].”
Cell C says that, while it experienced a marginal decrease in voice traffic over the two recent major holidays compared to the previous year, SMS traffic saw a significant increase.
The operator experienced an increase in voice traffic of 16% of the average daily traffic for the month of December on Christmas Day, and a similar pattern on New Year's Day. “1 January saw 18% increase of the average of daily traffic for the month of December.
“As usual, SMS traffic shot up by 41% on Christmas Day and 25% on New Year's Day when compared to the daily average for the month of December. [SMS] traffic increased by about 17% on both days compared to the same period last year.”
Virgin Mobile SA says its voice traffic remained fairly constant with a slight spike on Christmas Day, but SMS traffic over Christmas and New Year dropped by roughly 25%.
Chief operations officer at Virgin Mobile SA, Zak van der Merwe, says the drop in SMS traffic was in line with the operator's expectations. “This was expected as a result of the proliferation of BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) and other social media applications.”
8ta was unable to provide details by the time of publication.
Major measures
Ramodibe says Vodacom has instituted significant measures to enhance its management of high traffic volumes, such as those experienced over the recent holiday period.
“Last year, we committed R6 billion to improving the South African network. To date, we have spent about R3.5 billion on increasing the number of base stations, replacing radio equipment in stages across the country, and progressing our plan of self-providing transmission to our high data traffic sites.”
MTN says its network “performed well overall”.
MTN SA CTO Kanagaratnam Lambotharan says network-wide upgrades throughout the year ensured additional capacity was available to handle the expected traffic volumes for the peak period. Coastal areas, says Lambotharan, were given priority due to the migration of subscribers to these typical holiday destinations.
“The holiday season is always a busy time, when our network experiences high levels of traffic and, as always, we pre-plan for this. The MTN SA network did not disappoint customers over the New Year period. The network handled the anticipated influx of traffic across voice, data, SMS and MMS, without experiencing any network congestion.”
Lambotharan says the considerable increase in data usage volumes over the recent period is indicative of the role that the Internet plays in the lives of its consumers in terms of the way they communicate.
Cell C says its network capacity was “more than adequate” to handle the network traffic for the December holiday season.
“Cell C's network capacity is constantly monitored and checked to ensure no congestion or backlogs occur. The company invested heavily over 2011 in its end-to-end network to increase capacity and capability.”
Van der Merwe says Virgin Mobile SA “went to great lengths” to ensure that sufficient capacity was available for its customers over the holiday period.
Into the future
World Wide Worx MD Arthur Goldstuck says, although he initially found the prevalence of SMS surprising, it makes sense. He suggests it indicates that SMS still plays a powerful role in catchall communications.
"This shows that SMS is still essential for instant communication between cellphone users that do not share the same platform. This represents a drawback of instant messaging platforms like BBM and WhatsApp. The use of SMS will probably rise before it declines, even though the percentage of people using it is declining."
That being said, Goldstuck points out that the dramatic increase in data volumes is an indication of how ubiquitous instant messaging is. "It shows that data is the future of text communications."
Share