Phone users are spending more time chatting on their mobile but send fewer text messages, according to official statistics.

More than 121 million text messages were sent in the first quarter, a drop of 4.75 million over the same period last year, the National Statistics Office said. Even the number of multimedia messages, MMS, decreased, down by about 8,000 to 35, 000.

On the other hand, there was a sharp rise, up 99.6 per cent, in mobile phone calls to fixed lines, with 13,555,578 minutes having been recorded. The number of local outgoing minutes to mobile phones shot up by 18.4 per cent to 91.3 million minutes while mobile phone calls to international networks increased by 27.5 per cent to 2.3 million minutes.

Subscriptions to all forms of communication technology, excluding fixed telephony, continued to grow compared to the corresponding period last year.

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.