A Nielsen survey commissioned (sic!) by backhaul specialists Tellabs found that the mobile Internet is pretty much a part of life nowadays – at least in the territories covered by this. They asked 50,000 consumers in EU5 (Germany, France, UK, Spain and Italy) and the US about their intentions with respect to 10 mobile data services.
- Mobile Internet usage will ignore the global recession and ramp up significantly in the next 12 months.
- 71% of consumers anticipate daily use but concerns remain over – you guessed it – cost, speed and quality of service.
- There are c. 200m mobile data users in the surveyed markets (which by my count equates to about 1/3 of the total population). More than 50% of these users plan an increase of their usage in the next 2 years.
- 25% of the users who do NOT currently use data services, plan to do so shortly (this would be another 100m).
And it still goes on, it seems: Nielsen published its (digital) media top 10 lists for Q3/2008, and the once cool Motorola V3 still rules the United States – and by a HUGE margin. A whopping 9.3% of all phones in use are RAZR‘s, more than 7 points ahead of its sibling, the KRZR. Apple’s iPhone follows on #4 with 1.5% share. And Nokia‘s call to arms with a view to the US market has as yet to materialize: its best handset is the 6101 series with a meagre 1.1% (compared to a reported global market share of the Finnish giants of close to 40%). Sony Ericsson and Samsung are both notably absent from the list.
1 Motorola RAZR V3 series (V3, V3c, V3m, V3i, V3i DG, V3) 9.3%
2 Motorola MotoKRZR series (K1m, K1) 2.0%
3 LG VX8300 series 1.6%
4 Apple iPhone 1.5%
5 LG VX8500 series (Chocolate, VX8500, VX8550) 1.2%
5 RIM BlackBerry 8100 series (Pearl,8110, 8120, 8129) 1.2%
7 Nokia 6101 series (6101, 6102, 6102i) 1.1%
8 LG VX8350 1.0%
9 Motorola V325 series (V325, V323, V325i, V323i) 0.9%
9 Nokia 6010 series 0.9%
Source: The Nielsen Company, Q3 2008
According to research firm Nielsen (whose mobile arm incorporates what was previously known as Telephia), more than 20m household in the US (0r 17%) have ditched landlines in favour of mobile (or as they would call it cell) phones. It signifies a rather steep increase.
- U.S. cord cutters tend to have lower income-levels—59 percent have household incomes of $40,000 or less.
Smaller households, with just one or two residents, are more likely to cut the cord than larger households.
- Moving or changing jobs are the biggest life events associated with cord cutting: 31 percent of cord cutters moved prior to cord cutting and 22 percent changed jobs.
- Wireless substitutors tend to use their mobile phones more than their landline peers, 45 percent more per phone, but still save an average $33 per month in a household of one subscriber, less $6.69 for each additional wireless resident, when they cut the cord.
Now, what I do find surprising is not the fact but rather the apparent reasons given for “wireless substitution”. It is cost…On data, Nielsen also speculates:
“Landline wireless substitution may just be the start. [...] As wireless data networks improve and speeds become more and more competitive with broadband, some consumers may cut the Internet cord, as well, favoring wireless data cards and other access through carrier networks.”Now this I understand, and the study shows indeed that wireless-only consumers use the mobile Internet more than twice as often as their primary access to the web than the good old-fashioned rest (11% vs 5%). It will be interesting to see how quick this substitution works though for the masses: people with money tend to retain their landlines, which suggests that a wireless-only solution is still less convenient. With hardware (computers, phones, etc) becoming increasingly able to access multiple wireless standards (i.e. via the mobile networks as well as WiFi, etc), this factor might however be evaporating relatively quickly.
