Residents of Nizhny Novgorod chose in-person communication: call traffic increased by 15% over the holidays.

      13 January 2026 13:04 Society

      During the long New Year holidays, residents of Nizhny Novgorod, like most Russians, preferred to talk with loved ones rather than send messages. In the first 10 days of this year, data traffic in the Nizhny Novgorod region did not show a significant increase compared to the same period last year. However, voice traffic in the region broke a record and was the highest in the past five years, and compared with the same period last year it also grew by 15%.

      Across the country, the volume of minutes increased by 27%, and in total the country's residents talked for more than 6,500 years, analysts at MegaFon found based on anonymized data. The peak of voice communication traditionally came on December 31. On that day, the operator's subscribers used 14% of the total minutes on calls. In total, from December 31 to January 12, the country's residents talked for more than three billion minutes, which is equivalent to 6,530 years of continuous conversation.

      The most active callers were Russians aged 35–44 — they accounted for 25% of all voice-service users. Subscribers aged 45–54 were slightly less active (23%), and the third place was taken by the 65+ audience (20%). At the same time, it was the older generation who were congratulated more often than others: elderly Russians accounted for about a quarter of all incoming calls.

      Young people aged 14–24 chose voice communication noticeably less often (they accounted for 2%), but they were more often the initiators of calls: this category made more outgoing calls.

      The activity of the older generation also showed up in mobile internet. Users aged 65+ accounted for 21% of all data traffic used, while the share of subscribers aged 14–24 was only 6%. As expected, the leaders in internet-traffic volume during the New Year holidays were Russians aged 35–44 (35%), followed by subscribers aged 45–54 (24%) and 25–34 (15%).

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