The FINANCIAL — 8.1 million messages were sent at New Year via MagtiCom, according to Tatuli Gviniashvili, MagtiCom.
“This year more messages were sent out on Easter than at New Year as 8.1 million massages were sent at New Year and 9.0 million at Easter,” Gviniashvili said. “As for phone calls, 8.2 million calls were made on January 1.”
“MagtiCom is improving its service every year, therefore the network worked almost without hitches despite it being a very busy period. We don’t have any network problems during other periods of the year,” she added.
Beeline detected a record number of messages sent on January 1, which is a relatively new telecom operator compared to MagtiCom and Geocell.
The intensive usage of mobile services at New Year does result in some network problems, but the general situation has been improving year on year.
Short Message Services is becoming a more popular and well-used mobile service according to interviewed persons. The tariffs for messages vary from 0.01-0.06 GEL depending on the scheme. At the same time usage of phone calls is increasing as well. Currently if a subscriber is signed on to certain schemes, he/she can speak for as little as 0.01 GEL a minute, while tariffs have been 0.288 GEL in previous years.
About 5.0 million messages are sent monthly via MagtiCom according to the data of 2011. 5.4 million messages were sent in December 2011.
2,311,638 massages were sent on December 31 and 3,016,238 messages on January 1 via Beeline.
“Our subscribers talked for 6,038,308 minutes on December 31, which is 23 percent more in comparison to the same period of the previous year,” said Teona Bagdavadze, PR Manager of Beeline. “The total number of minutes Beeline subscribers talked for on January 1 was 7,092,565.”
“Despite the record number of calls made and messages sent via Beeline on December 31 and January 1, we did not experience any problems. Our New Year figures clearly show how the number of our subscribers has increased,” she added.
“As usual, Geocell takes special measures to prevent problems due to an overloaded network at New Year,” said Lika Metreveli, Corporate Communications Manager of Geocell. “This year was no exception and our technical service implemented all necessary procedures. As a result our network ran with minimal hitches on New Year’s Eve and January 1.”
Despite the claims of mobile operators, problems and errors were still recorded on January 1, especially during the period of 00:00 – 02:00.
The FINANCIAL interviewed 150 individuals and found that about 90 percent of them use Short Message Services.
10 percent of those interviewed admitted that they send about 50 messages per day via their mobile phones, while 25 percent send up to 30 messages per day. Only 5 percent send more than 50 SMSs a day. Half of the people interviewed (50 percent) send about 10 messages per day.
