SMS traffic surges on Facebook blockade

[Lahore_Real_Estate]

KARACHI: Facebook blockade benefited cellular phone firms, which witnessed marginal increase by more than 5 percent in SMS traffic in the last two weeks.

Officials of cellular phone operators said the overall voice traffic witnessed more than 5-7 percent surge by the users of social networking sites opted SMS as alternate for interaction. Without revealing the original data, they said the SMS traffic in the working and late night hours surged marginally on the different networks, thanks to bundle of packages.

According to an estimate, more than 96.23 million registered subscribers to various companies exchange nearly 14 million SMS on mobile phones network every month. They also said the number of cellular users increased marginally during the late night calls package in the last two weeks.

The number of Pakistan users on Facebook has estimated to reach 2.5 million. A significant number of subscribers believed to be devoted users of the networking sites, using it for interaction with friends. Besides, other websites such as Twitter is not very popular in the country. As per Alexa, a web information company, Facebook is ranked third as the most visited website in Pakistan whereas Twitter is ranked tenth on the same note. “The voice traffic has been increased but it did not cast any significant impact on the revenues of the mobile phone companies as SMS charges are lowest particularly on bundle packages,” an executive of mobile phone operator said. muhammad yasir