China's cellular operators initially estimated that customers in the country would send around 14 billion Lunar New Year text messages on their mobile phones during the eight-day holiday.

As numbers come in, it appears the estimate was conservative and that around 16 billion were sent by China Mobile's 306 million subscribers alone; more than 52 messages per subscriber.

During last year's Lunar New Year holiday, 400 million mobile phone subscribers sent 12.6 billion text messages, according to an article from Reuters.

Now, with more than 460 million mobile subscribers in China and more people using SMS, estimates indicate more than 20 billion messages were sent over the holidays.

The largest number of messages was sent on February 17, Lunar New Year's Eve, and February 18, Lunar New Year's Day.

China's largest operator, China Mobile Communication Corporation, handled 4.55 billion SMSs and 65.93 million multimedia messages (MMSs) on February 17.

Xiaoming Zheng, General Manager of Network Department at China Mobile, says: "The network configuration can safely handle the extreme SMS traffic peaks. China Mobile has conducted feasibility projections for increased user penetration and the network has been configured to support that growth."

Yiru Zhou, Ericsson account manager for China Mobile, says: "Sending SMS is very popular in China and many people use this method to send New Year's wishes to their contacts. Ericsson is the largest infrastructure supplier to China Mobile's network and we are happy to see that the network handled the surge of SMS traffic extremely well."

MMS is also on the rise this year.

Yi Fei Li, director of Network Performance Management, says: "China Mobile is seeing strong growth in MMS and the volume doubled in 2006, compared with that for 2005. More and more people send messages with pictures and animations, but most people still prefer sending SMS."

There is expected to be another large wave of SMSs sent at the end of the holidays on March 4, the Chinese Lantern Festival, but the volume is not expected to reach that of February 17.