2.2 Billion Text Messages for Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day is traditionally the busiest day of the year for mobile messages, and today is expected to be the busiest yet. A record 2.2 billion mobile messages, including short message service (SMS), and multimedia messaging service (MMS) messages, are expected to be sent and received today in North America alone, according to VeriSign (VRSN).

VeriSign, which powers inter-carrier mobile messaging for seven of the top 10 wireless carriers in North America, said that the number of messages on its infrastructure has traditionally jumped 40 percent on February 14 compared to an average day.

"This is a business where the ability to quickly scale to meet huge spikes in demand is absolutely critical," said Charles Meyers, VeriSign's group president for Messaging and Mobile Media. "VeriSign successfully met this demand by delivering 530 million SMS messages on New Year's Eve, and we're confident that Valentine's Day will bring another record day to the network."

Mobile messaging activity has shown strong growth in the past 12 months. VeriSign's global infrastructure currently enables over 400 million messages on a typical day. In 2007, VeriSign enabled 96 billion mobile messages across its network globally, up from 43 billion in 2006.