Soccer shocker boosts Vodafone's text traffic

A REPORT ON the Dow Jones Newswire says that Vodafone's GSM network in Portugal benefited enormously from the influx of soccer fans for the Euro 2004 tournament.

Spanish fans were the biggest 'roamers' with some 200,000 bringing their handsets with them while 130,000 Brits used their mobiles in Portugal. In terms of sending text (SMS) messages the Brits came out top, followed by the Spanish and Dutch. During the tournament some six million texts were sent compared to around two million voice calls being made.

The network got its biggest boost when the home team played in the final on Sunday. It seems that near to the stadium, six times the normal number of calls were made while SMS traffic shot up by 1,500 per cent. The locals were obviously commiserating themselves over defeat by the Greeks.

It just shows how mobiles help people share their experiences in real time - something which operators should bear in mind when designing services. It would be useful to know, however, how many Vodafone Live! users bothered to take snaps and send them as MMS (Multimedia) messages to each other. After all, plenty of them must have had cameraphones. µ