AT&T users are 3x more likely to text than call in 2025

Are you one of the people who'll rather text than pick up the phone and call? If you're an AT&T user, chances are that you are among the vast majority of people who prefer typing, as calls now account for only a fraction of the total activity.

Texting is three times more common than calling, AT&T's stats for 2025 show.

We're in the exabyte era now

AT&T's network (not just in the US, but in other countries, too) now moves about one exabyte of data on an average day. That's a pretty solid increase of about 1,000% in the last ten years. If we go back to 2005 – the pre-iPhone era, really – the increase is over 11,000%, which just goes to show how fast things are evolving in the tech world.

An exabyte of data amounts to one billion gigabytes – and that's transferred every single day in the past year.

How much data is that?

It is hard to wrap your head around how much data an exabyte actually is because the number is just so big. To put it in perspective, if you sat down to watch high-definition movies today and didn't stop for 32,000 years, you still wouldn't have finished an exabyte's worth of video.

It is the same as downloading every book ever written thousands of times over, every single day. Every photo you send or show you stream on the AT&T network adds to this massive total. Keeping that much information moving smoothly requires a connection that is not only powerful but also incredibly secure.

It could be the case that if you tried to store one exabyte on old-school floppy disks, the stack would be so tall that it would reach the Sun and back… several times.

Some more stats

Overall, AT&T says its network saw more than 181 billion calls in 2025 and over 525 billion text messages. The highest call day was October 31 (Halloween), while the highest text day was just a few weeks ago: December 1 (Cyber Monday).

The event that drove the most data on a single day was Mardi Gras. I guess lots of photos were taken on that day, and I can't blame you.

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