Flood of SMS greets cells cos on New Year’s

Neeraja Kumar in New Delhi

New Year’s eve saw a flurry of short messages (SMS) being exchanged by cellular subscribers. And the despite the preperations made by cellular networks to meet the surge in SMS, they were still caught off-guard by the unprecedented increase in the number of messages as customers faced problems while sending SMS.

This year saw AirTel subscribers sending a whopping eight lakh messages from 12 midnight till late in the evening of January 1. “We expect this figure to cross 10 lakh by the end of the day,” said Bharti Enterprises president of mobility Anil Nayar. This is a seventy five per cent increase over the number of messages sent by AirTel subscribers last year, he added.

Hutchison Essar another leading cellular operator in Delhi, witnessed an increase of 2.5 lakh SMS this year — from 1.75 lakh SMS on January 1, 2001 to 3.25 lakh SMS on January 1, 2002. “Of this 1.15 lakh messages were sent from 12 midnight to 1.15 am alone. On a normal day, 1.25 lakh sms are sent by Hutchison Essar subscribers,” informed Hutchison Essar CEO Sudershan Banerjee.

However, the surge in the SMS numbers was matched by the difficulties faced by cellular subscribers in sending messages. Essar customers complained of not being able to send or receive messages for some time from 12 midnight onwards. AirTel customers grappled with network overload problems well into mid-day of January 1. Most subscribers were either not able to send messages or their messages were delivered after a considerable time lag for one hour from 12 midnight onwards. Same was the case with Dolphin customers.

According to Mr Banerjee, “We have built a headroom in our network to ensure availability of satisfactory level of service of our users. Some amount of clogging took place because every one started sending messages at 12 midnight. However, within the next 10 minutes the situation stabilised.”

Mr Nayyar also admits that despite the fact that the capacity of the AirTel network has been increased nearly four times and carry up to 80 messages per second, surges are expected to happen at certain points — like when the clock struck 12 on New Year’s eve.