The Mobile Data Association (MDA) has today announced its latest quarterly UK research into mobile phone text volumes.

The figures show that 4825 billion messages were sent during September 2007, an average of over 1.2 billion messages every week, staggeringly, the same number of messages sent during the whole of 1999.

The research shows a 25% growth compared to 2006 and has caused the MDA to revise it annual predicted total figure from 48bn to 52bn messages in 2007.

The ever increasing popularity of texting is attributed to a number of reasons - how easy it is, businesses adopting the technology to communicate with staff and bundled/cheap text offers from operators.

Stat-attack! How those September figures breakdown:

4,825,000,000 per month

1,200,000,000 per week

173,000,000 per day

14,400,000 per hour (based texts being sent in 12 hour period)

239,000 per minute

4000 every second