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American texters send 4.1 billion per day

7 November 2009 21:00 by Andre "DVDBack23" Yoskowitz | 6 comments

According to new CTIA figures, American mobile phones users send 4.1 billion texts per day, adding up to 740 billion for the first six months of 2009.

The numbers show that about 14 texts are sent everyday on average by every American mobile phone user (276 million), although many teens average in the thousands and many users do not even have texts enabled.

Yahoo Tech writer Ben Patterson gives the following example to show off the giant figure in a different light:

Or, how about this: An SMS has a maximum capacity of 160 characters, so let's say (for the sake of example) that your average text message is about 80 characters long. And let's assume that your average novel contains about 100,000 words, and each word has about five letters. So ... assuming all that (and keeping in mind that my math is a little shaky), we here in the States are writing the equivalent of about 656,000 books�all via SMS�every 24 hours. At that rate, we could match the entire catalog of the entire New York Public Library system (which holds about 20.4 million books) in a little over a month.

2008 set the current record for a full year with one trillion total messages, and this year (given stable traffic for the rest of the year), that number should be surpassed by 50 percent or more.

Permalink to this article | Topic: Phones

State of Illinois to ban texting while driving (8 August 2009)

Texting girl falls into NYC manhole (13 July 2009)

Phone user sets text messaging record (23 April 2009)

Girl arrested for texting during school (18 February 2009)

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Discuss this article!
Morreale (Member) 7 November 2009 22:04
Why does this matter? lol [ + quote]
strykertc (Newbie) 7 November 2009 22:42
Yeah really, no surprise people are texting to keep their minutes down. ...Ben Patterson has no life. [ + quote]
klassic (Member) 7 November 2009 22:44
I don't know about other people, but I have so many damn minutes I don't know what to do with them. And now with Sprint I have free calls to all cell phones no matter the provider. Free nights and weekends. I use barely any minutes. [ + quote]
klassic (Member) 7 November 2009 22:51
dp [ + quote] This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 7 November 2009 22:52
engage16 (Member) 8 November 2009 22:43
I love all these plans for like '1200 anytime minutes per month' i have a 450 minute plan and am lucky to use 200 tops... although texting is usually around 8000 to 12000... =) [ + quote]
gnovak1 (Junior Member) 10 November 2009 13:45
Look for more people to fall into open manholes. [ + quote]