Aussies spend 32,000 years a year chatting on the phone

Melbourne - Australians collectively spent an incredible 32,000 years making and taking calls on their mobile phones last financial year, it has been revealed.

It’s the equivalent of more than 17 billion minutes spent chatting - almost double the amount of mobile phone time Australian telecommunications and media company Telstra users clocked up just five years ago, the Daily Telegraph reported.

The telecom company’s annual usage figures also revealed that its 9.8 million mobile phone customers sent more than 12 billion SMS texts in the 2011-2012 financial year - or about 33 million every day.

Text-happy customers like Newcastle’s Jackie Darley, 20, are sending SMS’s at an exponential rate, with a 250 percent increase in texting since the 2006-2007 financial year.

Despite the spread of communication via social networking sites like Twitter, Telstra Mobile executive director Warwick Bray said SMS still had enormous appeal.

“It’s the only way you can message anybody, whatever phone they’ve got and whatever software they’ve got,” he said.