Artwork: Chip Taylor A total of 6.37 billion text messages were sent through their messaging systems across Asia Pacific over the 2008/2009 Christmas and New Year period.

According to Acision, the communication solutions provider, short message service (SMS) messages formed a large majority of the traffic with 6.36 billion messages, while multimedia messaging service (MMS) messages were recorded at 9.54 million messages.

Philippines sent most messages

The top five countries with the highest SMS traffic processed over the festive season were the Philippines, again leading the ranking with 2.36 billion messages, closely followed by Indonesia (1.193 billion), Malaysia (1.075 billion) and Pakistan (763 million).

Boudewijn Pesch, managing director of Acision, Asia Pacific, said, "The festive season still remains a favourite high traffic period for operators and consumers alike. Compared to last year's traffic, this year the total messaging traffic in Asia Pacific grew by 40 percent."

MMS picks up

"In addition, we are seeing MMS traffic picking up pace across the region with 9.5 million MMS messages processed during this festive season. MMS traffic is bound to increase as consumers become increasingly savvy in interacting with their personal blog sites and applications such as Facebook", Pesch said.

In terms of year-on-year growth, Pakistan traffic volume grew by 253 percent compared to last year during the same period. Other markets that experienced high messaging growth include Philippines (65 percent), Australia (57 percent), Indonesia (27 percent) and Malaysia (13 percent).

"We are seeing a continued demand for robust and reliable SMS infrastructure and high quality end-to-end SMS solutions, as more and more mobile operators place their trust in the Acision's high performance SMSC", Pesch said.

This story, "Guess Which County Texts the Heaviest" was originally published by MIS Asia .