Submitted by Mike Grenville on Thu, 27 Nov 2003 21:12

Mobile operator DST Communications in Brunei had to make appeals on TV asking viewers to stop sending goodwill text messages during the Muslim festival of Hari Raya when the network became overloaded

The overload situation has been exacerbated with an avalanche of Hari Raya greetings and the Open Houses invitations to friends and family.

A ticker message was displayed during CNN news and an appeal broadcast on the Kristal Channel reported the Borneo Bulletin.

Meanwhile Arab News reported that Saudi Telecom Co. (STC) said that more than 26 million Eid greetings were exchanged through its SMS gateway on the eve of Eid and the network also experienced difficulty in connecting all calls.

The Times of Oman reported that in Oman Omantel registered a record number of SMS during Eid Al Fitr as subscribers exchanged 10,550,338 messages from Ramadan 28 till the sixth day of Eid.

1,757,313 SMS messages were sent on Ramadan 28 while the figure peaked up to 2,451,138 on the last day of Ramadan. However, in the first day of Eid Al Fitr a total of 2,370,441 messages were recorded as the SMS traffic exchange slumped relatively in the second day of Eid to stand at 952,850 messages and 739,330 messages in the third day of Eid while around 2,273,266 messages were sent in the following three days. A total of 9,722,467 SMS were exchanged during the last Eid Al Adha.