The latest Comreg statistics were released and as usual, throw up an array of data, too much to be all consumed here, but for a quick scan of the numbers I have taken out some of the salient points.
As with the data every quarter some of the numbers can be a little confusing, solely down to the rules pertaining to the data collection. For example we have a mobile penetration of 118% in Ireland (more mobiles than every man, woman and child in the country).
The reasons for that is that they are based on SIMS which are also used in mobile broadband and the way the data treats ‘live connections’ with a connection still considered live three months after cancellation.
We currently have 1.67m internet connections in Ireland, 31% of these coming from mobile broadband subscriptions.
We had 2.97m ‘active’ 3G sims in quarter two of 2013 – where active is connectivity in the past 90 days. Comreg estimate that once you take away the mobile broadband numbers out of that figure you get 2.44m smartphones/tablets active or a 53% penetration of the total mobile market.
What’s unfortunately missing here is the growing number of people with tablets and Ipads without a sim connection– but still active on the internet through freely provided wifi. So that ‘mobile’ internet access number could be much higher if the latter body were accounted for.
The data on WIFI gets very blurry unfortunately. The data only takes into account WIFI hotspots provided by the likes of Eircom, Bitbuzz etc. It doesn’t take into account the WIFI access provided by your local café or bar.
But some alarming data, but not so surprising data, was that based on SMS and MMS. Viber, Twitter, Instragram all which can be accessed via WIFI have made SMS volumes look very poorly. Peaking at 3.229 billion SMS messages sent in Q4 2011 the last quarter shows we sent (only) 2.44 billion in Q2 2013. It’s down 25 on the peak and down 10% on the previous quarter. It equates to an average of 450 SMS’s sent per mobile in the last quarter – stating that at an average of five per day seems a little easier to digest.
Mobile voice traffic is beginning to increase again with 2.75 billion minutes consumed in Q2 2013 or 500 mins a quarter per phone (five and a half minutes per day on average).
