A weirdly intriguing set of stats from Ofcom have just landed and it confirms a lot of our suspicions regarding how people live and work with mobile technology.
First, let’s have a look at the amount of outgoing calls that people are making from that funny phone-shaped object that seems to be a necessary part of getting home broadband. Yes, the traditional home phone. That thing you your parents call you on, even though your parents have an iPad and mobile phones.
Just look at the drop-off in recent years..
Next up, let’s have a look at calls on mobile phones. Think that people just don’t talk any more? Well, you’d be wrong. Although there’s been a slight dip in 2017, there’s still a huge amount on calls from mobiles and this has risen from 2012 until 2016..
At home, internet usage is increasing. We’re sitting on our WiFi and doing a lot with our connections. This graph shows the average GB data usage. Remember when home broadband ADSL connections used to have 40GB caps? Pfff, that’s been blown out of the water. We’re now touching nearly 200GB of data per month on our home connections..
Meanwhile, when we’re away from a WiFi hotspot, the data used through our mobile connections is on the rise too. Although there’s no doubt many data-hungry people out there, Ofcom sees that 1.86GB of monthly data is the average. I’ve got to say, that figure surprised me a bit and I thought it would be more, but perhaps we’re less likely to burn through that data allowance knowing about the costs of exceeding limits..
People are also buying less and less traditional 24-month contracts too. According to the stats, there’s been a big rise in 12-month deals, although this doesn’t show whether this is SIM-only or a contract with a phone included..
Meanwhile, although many networks give out unlimited texts, nobody is using them. Less and less people are texting. The use of SMS and MMS continues to decline, down by 13.7 bullion messages.
We’re also getting a greater access to 4G. Just 6 years ago nobody had a 4G connection, but the Ofcom stats show that, in 2017, it hit 63.5% of all mobile connections. This is all from operator data..
The data also reveals that the traditional desktop machine is really struggling to maintain any kind of significance. With the younger generation, the smartphone is king…
You can dive into the stats using this clever interactive report, but it’s clear that the smartphone is now becoming the device of choice, with home broadband becoming heavily used, SMS texting getting replaced by apps and the average monthly data usage continuing to increase.