Mobile users continue to text the day away

More than 2.1bn messages were fired off in the summer month, making it the sixth month in a row that more than 2bn were sent in total.

It means the volume of texts sent on the networks was up 28% from June 2003.

Every year since records began in 1999, the volume of SMS messages has boomed as mobile ownership has grown.

Last year, a massive 20.5 billion SMS messages were sent over the four main mobile networks.

Major events like summer music festivals, like Glastonbury, are likely to have helped fuel the increase in June.

Big sporting events like the Euro 2004 football tournament were also expected to have contributed to the texting frenzy.

But, says the MDA, no significant increase was monitored because England went out of the championship so early on.

Barcode tickets

Text messaging has, however, increasingly been taken up by organisers of events, especially in the arts, to make it easier for people to order tickets on the move.

Edinburgh Festival goers, for example, will able to order tickets that will be sent to them via text in the form of a barcode this year.

The barcode will then be scanned at the venue's box office.

The trial of the "paperless ticketing" system has been devised by an Edinburgh-based company called Mobiqa, which claims that the barcodes work with around 90% of mobiles.