Ofcom Report - July 2012

Ofcom's Communications Market Report is always full of stats. Here are a couple that I thought were interesting.

Fixed vs Mobile revenue

• Voice revenues declined, in contrast to data revenues. Fixed voice revenues declined by 4.9% in 2011 to £8.9bn, while mobile voice revenues fell by 0.9% to £10.5bn.
• Mobile messaging and handset data revenues increased 5.5% to £4.6bn.
• Fixed data revenues (broadband and narrowband) increased by 6.8% in 2011 to £3.4bn, with broadband contributing the vast majority. (All figures are retail.)

Voice

• The volume of voice calls shrank for both fixed and mobile telephony.
• The number of minutes of calls made from fixed telephones was down 10.0% in 2011, while the number of minutes of calls made from mobile phones fell for the first time: down 1.1% on 2010.
• For the first time, over half (52%) of all call volumes were made from a mobile.

Messaging

• People in the UK sent an average of 200 SMS and MMS messages per month in 2011.
• The average number of text and picture messages sent per UK inhabitant continued to increase in 2011, growing by 17% to 200 messages per month.

Broadband

• The total number of UK fixed broadband connections passed 20 million for the first time in 2011. 
• The number of mobile broadband connections passed 5 million during the year, and by the first quarter of 2012 76% of UK homes had a broadband connection of some description.

Mail (yes, indeed, this is included in the report!)

• Mail volumes have been falling consistently for the past five years, and declined by 25% between 2006 and 2011.
• Direct mail usage remains constant, in a failing market, meaning the its share of post is increasing.
• It is estimated that residential consumers send less than 10% of mail in the UK.

Ofcom Report provides pretty maps of Digital Britain

The UK telcoms regulator Ofcom provides its 3 year report on the state of consumer telecoms. It reports on fixed broadband, local TV, mobile base stations, digital TV, mobile coverage and digital radio, all displayed on maps. The level of granularity only goes down to the County level - a more local would have been more interesting.

To see the maps

Some nuggets of interest

• British households download about 17 gigabytes of data on average every month over their home broadband connections, suggests a report.
• About 900,000 premises cannot get 2G signals from all the UK's operators and 7.7 million UK places do not have 3G signals from the five operators that offer it.
• 72 per cent of mobile calls are still made on 2G networks (except on Three, which doesn't have a 2G network);

Thanks to a summary from The Register, here's a diagram which shows who is providing broadband services: look at the market strength of BT: to be anticipated, I suppose, given that it was formerly a monopoly.