Orange's fifth Digital Media Index has revealed an over explosion in data usage across its UK network, with the vast majority of it coming from broadband dongle subscriptions which were up more than 500 per cent compared with six months ago.
Paul Jevons, director of products, portals and services for Orange, said this latest Index indicated the mobile data era had truly arrived, and "an explosion in the number of mobile applications and new embedded laptops will boost mobile data demand even further in the coming months."
The company said its Q1/09 results revealed data now accounted for nearly 25 per cent of all of its revenues--up 3.3 per cent on last year. This increase must have been considerably helped by dongle usage having increased by over 4,000 per cent in the 12 months since launch.
Also of note was:
- Handset data usage increased by 108 per cent bringing the total number of GB downloaded per month to over 386,000.
- The total number of Orange UK customers with 3G handsets and/or dongles rose to 3.824 million as of the end of Q1/09.
- Mobile video grew 38 per cent quarter on quarter, with a total of 2.33 million videos downloaded between December and February 2009.
- The number of games downloaded topped 771,278 for the three month period, up 8 per cent on the previous quarter.
- The number of monthly unique users to social networking sites jumped 48 per cent quarter on quarter to 946,564, while monthly page impressions climbed 129 per cent.
- The Orange World portal attracted 3.25 million unique users between December and February 2009, a rise of 26 per cent.
However, the Orange survey also revealed worrying trends in consumer interest areas, given that the most frequent searches were for footballer's wife and pop singer Cheryl Cole, recently deceased reality TV star Jade Goody and US teen entertainer Mylie Cyrus.
For more on this story:
Telecoms.com [1], Mobile Today [2] and NMA [3]
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Orange: A three-year plan to weather downturn [5]
Orange aggregates social networking sites [6]
Rumour mill: Orange close to Apple laptop mobile broadband deal [7]