The vacations are a time for connecting with family and friends, both by gathering in individual or checking in remotely. So, naturally, you would possibly suppose phone calls can be at their highest in the course of the festive stretch on the finish of the 12 months. However in accordance with new figures shared with CNET by AT&T, one other vacation acquired the very best variety of calls in 2025. Which one?
The reply would possibly provide you with chills: AT&T’s subscribers conjured up round 651 million telephone calls on… Halloween. The corporate shared no different information moreover the large quantity, main me to marvel why the spooky season impressed so many calls. Misplaced trick-or-treaters calling their mother and father for rides? Individuals in costumes at events by accident butt-dialing their pals? Poltergeists pilfering individuals’s telephones? Solely the spirits really know.
Regardless of that one-day name quantity, texting is vastly extra well-liked than telephone calls over the course of the 12 months. Via Dec. 9, 2025, the community registered virtually 3 times extra texts than calls: 525 billion texts despatched vs. 181 billion calls made in the course of the 12 months.
And the highest texting day? Dec. 1, 2025, with round 2.3 billion (particularly 2,264,041,461) messages despatched.
These figures characterize visitors on AT&T’s cell community, which doesn’t embrace its dwelling or enterprise broadband providers. And, after all, it is a snapshot of only one supplier. AT&T has round 119 million subscribers, in accordance with Wikipedia.
Whenever you’re taking a look at phone plans, even unlimited phone plans, utilizing tens of gigabytes of knowledge throughout a month seems like rather a lot. However on the community degree, the dimensions is staggering, even in restricted areas.
For instance, AT&T additionally broke out its three largest information occasions in 2025: Mardi Gras (March 4) logged 57.5 terabytes; South-by-Southwest (SXSW) (March 7 to fifteen) went by 34.1 terabytes; and the System 1 Miami Grand Prix (Might 4) burned 24 terabytes. (One terabyte is roughly equal to 1,000 gigabytes.)
Total, throughout all of AT&T’s networks — cell, broadband and enterprise — the corporate reported common information visitors of 1 exabyte per day. That is 1 million terabytes.
With huge communications infrastructure constructed over the previous couple of many years by AT&T, Verizon, T-Cell and others, we’re doubtless long gone the times of telephone networks getting clogged by the surge of calls on Christmas Day.
So make a degree of calling your loved ones this vacation, or a minimum of ship a textual content. The community ought to have the ability to deal with it.
