Fan boys
The communications regulator - Ofcom - has published its latest international communications market report, and it concludes that UK consumers are among the earliest adopters on new comms technology.
This probably won't surprise most HEXUS readers, but it's interesting to see how quickly the adoption of new technologies spreads from enthusiasts to mainstream consumers. Especially telling is the finding that the UK has seen the fastest growth in smartphone take-up of the countries surveyed.
The assertion by the organisation charged with ensuring we get the best from our communications services, that we've never had it so good is transparently self-serving, but it might also be true. We certainly have a lot of them, with UK households among the leaders in the take-up broadband, digital TV and mobile connections.
While we're adopting smartphones at the fastest rate of the six countries surveyed, that's partly because this acceleration has already happened in other countries. The UK saw a 70 percent rise in smartphone subscriptions in 2009, compared to an increase of just 11 percent in Italy. But Italy still has the highest overall smartphone use, with 26 percent of the population owning one, compared to 18 percent in the UK
Apparently we're also among the leaders in accessing the Internet over mobile devices. One possible reason for this is that only 70 percent of households have fixed broadband. We're also low users of VoIP services, with the fact that broadband is often sold bundled with fixed-line telephony services a factor.
It looks like we're prepared to pay a fair bit for our mobiles too, with one of the highest proportions of subscribers (six percent) paying over £35 per month for their contracts. Presumably this is almost entirely down to the iPhone.
We're among the highest users of mobile mapping services (nine percent), and that figure is almost double the previous year's. The UK is also among the biggest users of mobile devices for social networking, with even older age brackets well represented.
The other area in which we're a nation of early adopters is the telly. The UK is the leader in digital TV take-up and in buying HD-ready tellies, but is lagging in the use of HDTV services. This anomaly seems to be the fault of content providers rather than end-users. We watch 225 minutes of TV per day, while the US leads the way with 280 and the average is 207. We're second only to the US in terms of DVR (Sky+, etc) adoption.
You can download the full report here.
