Mobile phone operators win World Cup
Soccer aside, the fiercest competition at the World Cup this year may well have been between mobile phone operators. And the verdict is in: They all won.
Cup sponsor T-Mobile fought Vodafone to deliver the fastest text message reports from games as well as video coverage. And fans around the world tuned in. Agence France Presse reports this morning, for example, that traffic on Vietnamese cell-phone networks spiked five-fold during the World Cup. The surge came as "tens of millions" of fans "sought football updates or placed bets on matches." In England, SMS messaging hit an all-time high even before the World Cup, notes Cellular-News, with a record 3.3 billion messages delivered in May thanks largely to national and European soccer competitions in the run-up to the Cup. With text messaging one of carriers' most profitable services, the surge in traffic can only mean that chief financial officers across the industry are joining the fans in shouting "Goaaaaal!" 
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