Just got this in from Ally at Vodafone:

Nearly 170m text messages were sent over the Vodafone UK network during the 24hrs of New Years Eve and Day. At its peak, just after midnight, over 6,000 text messages a second were processed. The same period saw Vodafone customers make nearly 90 million calls. The festive season also saw a record numbers of people sending picture messages, with 1 million sent on Christmas Day alone. Data usage also rose dramatically with over four times higher figures than in the same period last year.

6,000 texts a second eh?

Somehow, actually, I reckoned it would have been a lot more.

However, if you sit and work it out, that does begin to add up rather quickly. If you assumed a throughput of 5,000 messages a second for a whole minute, that would add up to 300,000 texts a minute.