dtac responds to the social networking trend by preparing dtac Internet especially to serve New Year greetings

Pakorn Pannachet, Head of dtac’s VAS Division, said dtac prepared its nationwide network to support traffic during the New Year. dtac realizes that the 3 main social networking systems namely Facebook, Twitter and BBM (BlackBerry Messaging) are the very quickly accelerating trend of 2009 while SMS and MMS are still gaining in popularity compared with last year.


“We have seen the increasing use of smart phones throughout this year. At present dtac customers use 400,000-500,000 smart phones and we believe that New Year greetings via smart phones should focus on social networking especially through Facebook and Twitter. In Thailand about 1.7 million people are using Facebook and about 60,000 people are doing Twitter. For the dtac customers who uses dtac’s BlackBerry Service, we have prepared our network to support more convenient and faster BBM use in Thailand through dtac Internet.”

“SMS and MMS should not be less popular than they were in the past years. We expect New Year greetings via SMS to increase from 49.95 million messages last year to about 65-70 million messages and those via MMS should rise from 656,000 messages last year to about 800,000-1 million messages. dtac has prepared its systems to support the transmission of 7,500 messages per second, up from the normal capacity of 2,000 messages per second. So customers are assured that dtac’s network can meet their demands limitlessly,” Pakorn said.

Besides, dtac has also prepared its network by increasing channel capacities at New Year celebration venues in major provinces of all regions. For Bangkok, it has prepared mobile units and increased the capacities of base stations to serve communication traffic surges in several areas including bus terminals, airports and highways leading to other provinces.