The latest newsletter from the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association reports Canadians sent 71.5 billion text messages in the first 9 months of 2012, which almost eclipses the entire 78 billion sent in all of 2011. 438.8 million MMS messages were sent in this same period (326.7 million were sent in 2011 alone).

In September 2012 alone, 8.2 billion text messages were sent (274 million per day) and 58.9 million MMS sent (1.96 million per day).

As for some holiday stats, 424.5 million were sent by Canadians on Christmas Day and another 429.4 million texts sent on New Year’s Day.

Of course, these numbers don’t take into account the number of message sent via third party networks, such as WhatsApp or iMessage. For the latter, Apple announced during their Q1 2013 earnings call 2 billion iMessages were being sent every day. How often are you texting every day?

[via CWTA]