Mobile Users In Beijing Open New Year With 400 Million SMS Messages

Mobile customers in Beijing, China, kicked off the Chinese Lunar New Year holiday with tons of SMS text messages -- 400 million to be exact. According to numbers from the two largest carriers in the city, partying Beijingers sent roughly 5,800 text messages per second on Saturday. That's a whole lot of text messages.China's two biggest carriers, China Mobile and China Unicom, said on Sunday that the Chinese would send approximately 14 billion text messages during the seven-day Lunar New Year holiday. China is the world's largest cell phone market, claiming 460 million subscribers at the end of 2006. China's Ministry of Information predicts that the country will reach 520 million mobile users by the end of 2007.