Irish sending 191 texts a month

Twenty years after the first SMS message was sent, the average Irish person is now sending 191 text messages a month.

Twenty years after the first SMS message was sent, the average Irish person is now sending 191 text messages a month.

Figures from the second quarter of this year show the 5.4 active Irish sims are sending a total of more than one billion texts a month.

Latest figures from Comreg show that over 3 billion texts have been sent in the second quarter of this year. Nearly 6.4 billion SMS messages have been sent before the end of June this year.

More than 5.5 billion voice calls and 24 million SMS messages have been made during the same time frame. Text message surpassed voice calls for the first time in the first three months of 2009.

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Irish mobile users are also amongst the most frequent to send texts in Europe.

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the first text message when 22-year-old software engineer Neil Papworth sent a Christmas text to a friend.

A spokesman for Comreg said that despite a slight slip in SMS rates over the last two quarters, the constant development of new mobile technology will maintain high SMS rates.

The regulator's newest figures relating to mobile use will be released later in the month.