Friday 14 December 2007

Mobile Service use swells worldwide

A new report by British media and telecommunications watchdog Ofcom reveals the use of mobile service like text messages and pictures messages are increasing fast worldwide.

China is tops for text messaging and India is the mobile leader according to the report, but Britain has the highest take-up of digital television.

Mobile phone users in China (where ROK Comics is fast developing its partnership with China Mobile) sent 429 billion text messages in 2006 (an equivalent of 967 per user, more than any other country), while India added more mobile subscribers in the year than Britain had in total, as the two countries joined Brazil and Russia in driving growth in the sector.

The report also found that accessing the internet from a mobile phone is growing in popularity. In Japan, where over half of mobile phones use a 3G network, mobile users are three times more likely to send an email from their mobiles as they are a text message. However, Europeans send more text messages with 75 per cent of mobile phone users in the UK, France, Germany and Italy sending SMS messages regularly.

The number of mobile-only households has also risen. In Italy, 38 per cent of households are mobile only, compared to around 13 per cent in the UK and 10 per cent in Germany. By the end of 2006 there were, for the first time in the UK, more households with a mobile connection than a landline.

James Thickett, Ofcom's Director of Research, discusses the International Communications Report in the video below and explains how the UK is digitally connected.

No comments: