This year's Valentine's Day will be the busiest text messaging day ever, according to industry experts.

Researchers at VeriSign predict that 2.2 billion text messages will be sent in North America alone, representing a 40 per cent increase over normal daily traffic and a 300 per cent increase over Valentine's Day in 2007.

Ashwin Puri, senior product manager of global messaging at VeriSign, told vnunet.com that Valentine's Day is traditionally the second-busiest day of the year for text messaging after New Year's Eve.

Holidays which traditionally involve social gatherings, such as Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's, tend to bring in the highest volumes of text traffic.

Puri predicted that the Valentine's Day SMS flood will have an impact on mobile phone carriers, but will not lead to serious problems.

"We expect the numbers to tax the networks," he said. "What you might see is potential delays, but it is nothing that [the carriers] cannot handle."