BEIJING, Jan. 29 (Xinhuanet) -- It is estimated that nearly 12 billion short text messages will be sent through mobile phones in China during the seven-day holiday of the Spring Festival in 2006 starting from Sunday.

    During the seven-day holiday of the Spring Festival in 2005, 11 billion text messages were sent in China.

    With the popularization of mobile phones in China, more and more people tend to use short message service, which is both simple and cheap, to communicate with each other.

    In 2005, the average per month increase of mobile phone users is five million and 393 million users in China were registered at the end of 2005.

    According to statistics of the Ministry of Information Industry,in 2005, Chinese mobile phone users sent over 25 billion short messages per month.

    The total number of short messages sent in 2005 was over 304.6 billion, more than 300 times of that of 1 billion in 2000. Enditem