Sign up for the paNOW newsletter
(file photo/CKOM News Staff)
Mother's Day

Mother’s Day always a busy one for SaskTel

May 13, 2019 | 5:35 PM

It appears to have been a busy Mother’s Day for SaskTel.

The Crown-owned telecom expected a lot of use from its networks with a projected near-million phonecalls to take place in the province.

According to Greg Jacobs, external communications manager with Sasktel, there was a high data use as well.

The amounts have not been officially tallied yet, but Jacobs provided projections to paNOW.

“Really the big thing we’re expecting, is approximately 116,000 gigabytes of data to be used on our network on that day,” he said.

Jacobs said the high use of data is following a long term trend which has seen the usage climb by 25 per cent every year on Mother’s Day.

“We are very confident in our projections that we are close and what we have seen in years past that we’re usually very close,” he said.

When looking at the projections, Jacobs said it is clear the company’s customers are communicating in a different fashion then they had in the past.

In terms of text messaging on Mother’s Day, Jacobs said those numbers have been pretty stable, whereas more tradition forms of communication have seen the biggest decrease.

“Really where we see the decrease is phone calls. We see a lot more people opting to go to data messaging,” he said.

When looking at the devices people are using to make phone calls, Jacobs said they were expecting around 800,000 phone calls on the cellular network and over 500,000 on traditional landlines. While the number of calls made on landlines has dropped as more people move to cellular, Jacobs said they are not expecting to see a major drop in landline calls.

“We’re not anticipating massive declines in the near future,” he said.

MichaelJoel.Hansen@jpbg.ca

On Twitter:@mjhskcdn

View Comments