Ofcom Report Shows Changing Mobile Behaviour

In August, Ofcom released its seventh annual Communications Market report, highlighting some interesting points about the state of the telecoms market and how consumers are changing mobile phone buying behaviour.



Particularly salient are details about the escalating ownership of smartphones such as BlackBerries and Apple’s iPhone 4. The report shows that ownership of these feature-rich mobile phones was up from 7.2 million users in 2009 to 12.8 million in May 2010 – an uptake of 81%.



The Rise of Smartphones

In June 2010 over a quarter of people in the UK responded that they had a smartphone, a number which has more than doubled from 2008.

With smartphones, mobile phone use is changing from basic call and text. In the first quarter of 2009 nearly 20% of adults sent emails or accessed content on their mobiles. In the same period this year, this number is up to almost a quarter. Amongst younger users 15 to 24 years old, almost half are using their mobile phones in this way.

Surfing the web has become the fastest growing media activity on mobile phones. Social networking is dominating this, with Facebook taking up almost half of our total time spent online on mobiles in December last year.



In consequence of this shift in mobile activity, the volume of data transferring across mobile networks has rocketed by 240 per cent in 2009. Networks have responded to this with sensitivity to fair usage limits, with O2 choosing to cap the data limits offered with pay monthly mobile phone contracts.



The sharp rise in data transfers across mobile networks has also been driven strongly by the growing market for mobile wireless broadband from laptops with dongles. In the youngest age group 15 to 24, mobile broadband use is up by 8%. They aren’t the only ones though, with 3% more 35 to 54 year olds taking up the product too.



Ofcom notes that this implies that "younger age groups may be switching from fixed to mobile broadband (and driving overall mobile broadband growth by doing so), while increasing fixed broadband take-up among older consumers has offset the resulting fall in take-up among younger people."