Wednesday is Christmas Day, and SaskTel is expecting to handle a lot of calls, texts and other data usage.

The phone company’s Tim Jones has some tips for those reaching out to touch someone. “The first thing you want to do is make sure your cell phone is fully charged because one thing you don’t want to do is get cut off on that call to mom, she’s not going to like that. If you are making a video call use wifi, avoid using up your data. Video calls like to chew through data so make sure you’re on that wifi and save your data plan.”

He also said there are times to avoid making calls. “We see the peaks, they come in between about 11:00am – 2:00pm and about 4:00pm – 7:00pm or so. those are the times you are going to want to avoid if you want to make sure you’re call makes it through without getting any busy signals.”

Jones said interestingly, more people are leaning away from messaging in favour of voice calls. “It’s quite impressive, voice calls are making a bit of a come-back. On Christmas Day we are expecting about a 38 percent increase in voice calls being made, which is quite a return to making that more personal way of contact.”

SaskTel is expecting more than 1.8 million calls placed and 1.3 million calls received, and over 24 million text messages to be sent.

(CJGX)