Texting trumps talking today
More and more, Saskatchewan residents are letting their fingers do the talking.
This year, SaskTel expects its customers alone will send some eight million text messages on Christmas Day. That number has remained relatively stable over the past few years, but it’s the number of phone calls that seems to be dropping.
SaskTel anticipates around 600,000 long-distance phone calls will be made — 450,000 calls from landlines and 150,000 from cellphones.
Compare that to 2004 when SaskTel logged around 850,000 long-distance calls just from landlines.
Still, that’s a lot more phone calls than the Crown corporation deals with in a normal day. While all calls — from landlines and cellphones — end up on a wire line switch, there are more wireless signals bouncing off cell towers across the province.
“It impacts congestion, but not a rate we can’t handle,” said SaskTel spokeswoman Michelle Englot.
About 40 per cent of those calls will be made to other locations within Saskatchewan, 54 per cent to other provinces and six per cent internationally.
To make things easier on callers, SaskTel suggests making calls outside prime hours of 10 a.m.-2 p.m. and 7-10 p.m.
While there will be a number of calls made on Wednesday, such high-volume events are actually a little easier than one-time events like, say, the Grey Cup.
During the Grey Cup festivities in Regina, Englot said, engineers were busy making sure available network space met with the call capacity of hundreds or thousands of calls, texts and Tweets coming from one place in a short period of time be it from a party venue or the game itself.